Ideas and shadows

As signalled above, the categorisation of texts into genres can be carried out according to different criteria related to knowledge, purpose, and even the philosophical stance, worldview or ideology motivating the categorising agent (Ulbak 2015: 428–429, 435). This raises the question of the inescapable subjectivity of classification. The problem of subjectivity may be partly alleviated by resorting to the concept of the interpretive (discourse) community; a community that sustains and perpetuates particular ways of creating texts, and inferring meanings from them, in accordance with what is considered relevant by both readers and writers. Hence, Frow defines genres as “frames that establish appropriate ways of reading or viewing or listening to texts […] made up of material and formal features, a particular thematic structure, a situation of address which mobilises a set of rhetorical purposes, and a more general structure of implications” (2006: 31). A common feature of literary genre theories is that prime importance is attached to stylistic variables; that is, choices in linguistic form that are motivated by aesthetic, thematic and rhetorical concerns (which can be seen as the modern expression of decorum). It is this factor that seems to play an instrumental role in distinguishing among literary forms. But Frow draws our attention to the fact that the organisational (or else compositional) and rhetorical variables of literary genres may also be related to the non-linguistic submodes of language. As I have noted, these submodes are crucial for setting liberature apart from other types of literary texts. The concept of liberature enables us to distinguish between works whose authors make use of them and deliberately hybridise the linguistic and bibliographical codes treating the form of the book as a sign in its own right, and those who leave such decisions to others, judging them to be semantically and aesthetically irrelevant. This is a valuable nuance since some authors choose to utilise only the typographic submode, or use non-verbal codes in parts of their works, which makes their texts akin to, but not identical with, liberature.

Frow defines genres as frames that structure the conditions of comprehension and interpretation. In his discussion of this he focuses on recipients who act as genre verifiers. However, it is evident that authors play a comparably significant role, both in terms of the formation of genres and their ongoing function.