Planetary Figurations: Intensive Genre in World Literature

Abstract

This article surveys the growing attention to genre in the works of Wai Chee Dimock, Rosi Braidotti, Lauren Berlant and Rita Felski, among others. I argue that attention to transnational genres, far from valorising global sameness, offers a way to mark cultural difference, relationality and the specific knowledge of nationally and locally embedded traditions. The influx of new voices and visions, I contend, has changed our view of what literature is and does, moving away from the notion of genre as a classificatory system and towards a new idiom centred on affect, flux and creative invention. The constitutive openness of global figurations lies at the root of our current fascination with genre theory, especially in debates about world literature. Relationality and futurity, I suggest, are what makes genre theory especially relevant to the cultural-discursive matrix of planetarity, which is similarly concerned with processes of becoming.In an essay published in 2012, comparatist Mariano Siskind deplores the conspicuous absence of genre categories, both historical and formal, from recent critical debates about world literature. Since the close of the twentieth century, he explains, scholarly attention has focused on global patterns of production, circulation, translation and transcultural appropriation, leaving little room for an organizing concept that seems to imply transhistorical sameness at the expense of geocultural diversity. This lack of engagement with genre, for Siskind, marks a problematic break with century-old traditions of learning and leaves theorists without a ' critical tool capable of realizing the promise of order in a world of textual chaos' (Siskind 2012: 345). World literature, according to this American scholar, has given rise to new imaginaries and generic formations, but critics have not, until now, found ways of articulating the creative potential of these phenomena. Instead, genre tends to remain associated with traditional notions of textuality and reception that are no longer perceived as a useful matrix. Siskind concludes: 'We need a new conception of genre as a contingently bound, heterogeneous discursive constellation that provides world literary readers with a ground for comparison' (354).Siskind's call did not fall on deaf ears. Genre, as I want to show in this article, is in the process of becoming once again a central critical concept in the arts and humanities. This is partly the result of a more general fascination with popular genres. As Theodore Martin has shown, contemporary authors and filmmakers are increasingly drawn to the constraints of recognizable generic traditions, which they explore not in the spirit of postmodern playfulness but in an ' earnest attempt to contribute to the history of a given genre' (Martin 2017: 8).

Passages

“…See also Klein (2019, Introduction). 6 See Mussgnug (2018). 7 See Bonneuil and Fressoz (2015); Davies (2016).…”