Genre as a (proto)type

Institutions for storing and accessing knowledge (schools, libraries, dictionaries, encyclopedias, databases, etc.) are an important cultural environment in which genres perform their categorising function. In connection with teaching and cataloguing, John Swales remarks that “it is apparently common in classificatory work to consider genres as ‘ideal types’ rather than actual entities. Actual texts deviate from the ideal in various kinds of ways,” but some simplification for the sake of practicality is unavoidable and does not invalidate the usefulness of genre as such (Swales 1990: 34). Likewise, drawing on the work of E.D. Hirsch, Alastair Fowler points to the advantages of construing genre in terms of the prototype (1982: 41– 42). He notes that a type, unlike a class, may include only a singular specimen, which seems to partly alleviate the Crocean dilemma. Besides, not all specimens belonging to a type need to display the same characteristic (which, as he claims, is essential for a member of a class; Fowler 1982: 38). As a consequence, he suggests that genre is better understood as a framework within which works are compared synchronically and diachronically for shared characteristics in a heuristic way (see also Rosch 1978: 36–37; Ulbak 2015: 432–433; Fishelov 1993: 53–84), rather than being tested for their purity, and eliminated if they do not fulfill specific criteria.

Stressing the practical or utilitarian aspect of genre use, Fowler calls this approach functional; a position shared by Dirk de Geest and Hendrik van Gorp, who discuss genre from the systemic-functional perspective. Taking their inspiration from cognitive psychology and linguistics, the Belgian scholars argue for genres to be understood as “prototypically structured categories” (de Geest and van Gorp 1999: 39–42). In their view, genre should be seen as a loose set within which some elements are located closer to the centre, while others hover on the edges, without forming any distinct borderline. The centre of such a set is determined by a prototypical work that contains the highest possible concentration of features associated with a genre. But we must bear in mind that the prototype does not need to be any actually existing text. It is rather a conceptual model against which actual works can be tested to determine their relation to the prototype.