New Literary History
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- New Literary History
In 1986, Ralph Cohen published a paper in response to Derrida's "The Law of Genre" titled "History and Genre." In this article Cohen argued that "genre concepts in theory and in practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons. And since each genre is composed of texts that accrue, the grouping is a process, not a determinate category. Genres are open categories. Each member alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or changing constituents, especially those of members most closely related to it. The process by which genres are established always involves the human need for distinction and interrelation. Since the purposes of critics who establish genres vary, it is self-evident that the same texts can belong to different groupings of genres and serve different generic purposes" (Cohen, 204). This approach to genre theory is the one most widely practiced today.
