In his interpretation to hexagram 45 ‘Gathering Together’ of the I Ching Wang Bi (226-249) quotes the Commentary on the Appended Phrases: “Those with regular tendencies gather according to kind, and things divide up according to group.” and expands this with “Only when innate tendencies are the same will things gather, and only when material forces are in harmony will things group.” (R. J. Lynn’s 1994 translation)

The fundamental principles of how genre operates in our daily lives can be said to be encapsulated in those two simple statements (gathering by kind and dividing into groups). But as with all things that appear easy on the surface the implications and ramifications are far reaching. Genre, by John Frow, is a dynamic and lucid exposition on the process of “how genres actively generate and shape knowledge of the world.”

The book, published in the Routledge series of introductory guides entitled The New Critical Idiom, is not concerned with enforcing or describing any classification of genre upon literary or other discursive mediums such as film, music, or every-day talk, rather it explores genre as an abstraction: as a powerful force through which we shape, are shaped, and through which we sort out information; gain knowledge; and ultimately extrapolate meaning.

As such, genre, turns out to be a two way process within a cultural milieu that enables us to shift between the various frameworks or worlds that we co-inhabit. Knowing how to differentiate between a sermon and a joke is dependent on our ability to ascertain the nature of each, to read the context of each and process it accordingly. Recognizing its generic makeup, not as something fixed but able to shift at any instant, enables us to transpose and play with the whole gamut of possibilities including making up a sermon-as-joke or a joke-as-sermon. As Frow points out, we are constantly making decisions based on genre, deciding between watching a feel-good love movie or a horror film, “because we are at some level aware of other genres that it is not” (p.125) but it is not any classification system per se that is important, but the structure of relationship and dynamic interrelationships that makes a given piece of poetry, for instance, resonate with one or several strands of a tradition and simultaneously alter our perception of that tradition. One could easily envision, for example, the same set of words displayed on a hoarding and a tombstone, both “speak-out” and address the passer-by, but even though they could also be typographically identical, the epitaph and hoarding will evoke or generate different meanings.

In locating the nature of genre beyond the noun (genrification, however, remains an awkward term which is wisely used very sparingly) Frow is able to explore and extend the essential properties of a term that had become so restrained by the straightjacket of the Romantic triad (lyric, epic, and drama) inherited or misconstrued from Plato and Aristotle as to be rendered almost irrelevant. Each of the six short chapters takes up a salient aspect or approach to the term, such as the relation of simple to complex genres; explores some of the radical stances that have been taken vis-à-vis the concept over the past decades, in the process pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of theories that at times ignore the context and open-endedness of genre that makes any classification “unstable and unpredictable”; and brings to the foreground the uses of genre as frameworks used to orient ourselves.

One of the metaphors that Frow employs to bring into relief the idea of how genre ambiguously mediates and defines the inner/outer boundary is the picture-frame. Seeing genre as a frame that delimits a particular piece of information is useful but perhaps a more complex and dynamic metaphor could have been found in the idea of the window-frame that, with its added dimension of depth, brings the possibility of multiple perspectives. No matter if looking from within or without, shifting our standpoint brings different elements into view through the frame, thus although a window is static, what is framed depends on where we stand in relation to it.

What makes this slim volume fascinating reading, and not only essential reading for students of literary and cultural studies but for a broader readership, is the restraint that Professor Frow shows in setting out precisely some of the essential qualities of the concept of genre without dismissing conflicting aspects. The idea that every work is unique, espoused by Croce among others, need not be argued against in order to prove a point, by allowing a certain flexibility of multiple interpretations to co-exist in our understanding of how genre operates we can come to appreciate the various levels that a given text embodies:

“Texts work upon genres as much as they are shaped by them, genres are open-ended sets, and participation in a genre takes many different forms” (p.28).

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