Beyond Essence (or, Getting over 'There'): Cognitive and Dialectical Theories of Genre

Fredric Jameson's (1981) original project of a dialectic genre theory & its continuation by other writers as a favorite candidate to replace essentialist theories of genre are argued to lead to an impasse, as the impetus to situate genre in discourse as opposed to text or writer founders on the need for a genre to mediate history, which requires the attribution of genre existence to text & writer. A proposed alternative approach to genre applies a prototype theory of cognitive categorization to link writer's & reader's genre in terms of the text as an embodiment of the writer's & reader's respective cognitive models; in such a cognitive approach, workable genre stability arises from the extent to which the cognitive models of the writer & reader are isomorphic. 29 References. J. Hitchcock