ABSTRACT
Genre criticism have been 'thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice', the full range of variously mythical, positivist, or even intuitive 'production' theories of genre having given way to the pragmatic provisional acceptance of any generic definition, more less, as a meaningful conditioner of readerly expectation. Pavel Medvedev's counter-intuitive inversion of the concept of system can be understood against the background of Bakhtin's tendency towards cyclical re-evaluation of favourite themes, which, when coupled with the uncertainties produced by varying treatments of certain of these themes by Valentin Voloshinov and Medvedev, has made it difficult to reconstruct an exhaustive account of a literary programme from their work. Medvedev identifies the 'dual orientation' of genre as its definitive characteristic. Medvedev, perhaps surprisingly, offers no literary-historical exemplification of his theory, instead essaying a brief, densely concentrated explication of its consequences, which forms a bridge in the work between the exposition of the 'dual orientation' of genre and a concluding dismissal of Formalism.
