Structural, rhetorical and thematic dimensions

Frow distinguishes three “structural dimensions” of genre that, taken as a cluster, determine the scope of what can be expressed and how. These are “the formal organization of genre,” “the rhetorical structure,” and “the thematic content” (Frow 2015: 81–83). The first dimension refers to ways of “shaping the material medium,” starting from such an elementary decision as the choice between oral or written language, i.e. the semantic medium and its submodes. Other formal choices include text length, its layout, and all that can be called the physical setting. Though he does not consider these last parameters as generic components per se, nevertheless Frow acknowledges that they function as “framing conditions which govern and may signal generic structure” (80). They shape the medium in a physical sense, but this is also related to ways of generating sense in the linguistic layer. An example is structuring a poem into stanzas, and using enjambment, which is a spatial- visual way of adding meaning to the syntactically generated sense. This means that the choice of the printed book as form may be comparable, as a generic signal, to graphic properties of poetry regulated by punctuation marks. It is a meaningful way of segmenting textual space, “and it stipulates certain kinds of textual cohesion” (81) related to the book's architecture: a codex, a leporello, a “shuffle” book, a scroll, etc. This is, in turn, related to the other aspects of the formal organisation of the work, which embrace “the ‘immaterial’ categories of time, space and enunciative position” (ibid.). In liberature these categories cross-sect the book form in ways that produce the effect of blending the fictional space and time with the actual space of the book interface and the reading time (cf. Bazarnik 2010a). The fusion may be reinforced through metatextual, narratorial comments, or by covert, ambiguous passages that may be metaphorically related to the architecture of the book. This happens, for example, when the unnamed narator of The Unfortunates thinks about his friend's physical disintegration. The word “degeneration” is the last of the section, separated from the preceding text by an extremely long blank.

These formal aspects of genre are interconnected with the rhetorical dimension, which pertains to relations between senders and receivers, “organised in a structured situation of address” (Frow 2015: 82).