Doing Genre Group Phi As even the casual browser of learned journals or half-listener at academic conferences knows, the question of “literary form” and its relationship to “history” is again open for discussion. For a sampling of examples, see the special issues of Representations 104 (Fall 2008), PMLA, 122:5, (2007) and Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000) devoted to the topic, as well as studies such as Cohen (2007). The long version of Marjorie Levinson’s PMLA essay “What is New Formalism?” can be consulted at HYPERLINK "http://sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article/home" http://sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article/home. This site offers a growing (and therefore the most up-to-date) bibliography for what Levinson identifies as a “movement” rather than a critical methodology. Some might counter that the discussion had never actually stopped. Yet it seems safe to say that the ready settlements of the past thirty years provided by variously historicist or materialist approaches have ceased to convince. The advent of an historicist settlement to these issues was articulated and resisted by de Man, 3-20. We have not yet arrived at a working paradigm amenable to transportation across the boundaries of period, medium, and nation that define our critical practices as scholars. Questions of form, however, travel across these boundaries in ways that make cross-field conversation critical to any broad description of the phenomenon. This collectively authored essay broaches such a conversation. It attempts to represent salient points of discussions undertaken over the course of several years--occasioned by our individual investigations into various fields, inflected by different approaches to textual study--in an effort to identify and define the terms that provide useful common ground in our disparate ventures. Genre is the phenomenon that we have found particularly helpful in theorizing relationships of form and history, not only because of the ways specific genres so visibly cross and produce these field boundaries, but also because genre mobility presses us to rethink the overly static notions of form that, we shall argue, often distort the practices of reading and writing we ask these models to explain. In current critical usage, for example, “conventions” are typically the trivializing name used to comprehend genres that remain abstracted, inert, dead; while “forms” are the approving name given to genres that are specified, adopted, used, lively. We suggest a slightly revised division of verbal labor that distributes different orders of liveliness throughout the circuit of readerly practices: using “genre” as the name for the sedimented, historical category that is received by readers, and “form” for readers’ activity of adopting / adapting that category in further use. In these terms, genres act as the quasi-geological formations that are bases for such further acts of making. Genres might thus be thought of as nominalizations of the verb “form”: the cultural memory of uses, instructing us in the motions and activities of forming that come before “us.” Different literary fields have newly engaged genre for different reasons. In film studies, for example, Christine Gledhill has argued that this renewed interest is a consequence of the steady shift away from the grand theories of the 1970s, focused on “totalizing philosophical or scientific quests” for the big social truths of “history and revolution (Marx and Althusser), self and identity (Freud, Lacan), or language (Saussure, semiotics)” (Gledhill, p. 221; 5). In the fields of early modern studies and Romanticism, as Marjorie Levinson has observed, frustration tends to come from the opposite direction; here, it is not so much grand theories as the New Historicist propensity to situate texts in ever more local cultural contexts that has led to a felt neglect of the crucial dynamics of how texts actually might be said to work. Levinson notes that much “new formalist” work has sought to redress and rededicate itself to the failures of preceding movements. Our interest is slightly different: we broach a theory of reading, writing, and performing genre that builds on the important gains of these divergent critical traditions to ask how and why larger formal structures persist or fail over longer spans of time. Recent historians of the novel have started to explore these issues, including Doody, Moretti (2006) and Mander. See Rowe (1999) for a longitudinal study of literary motifs for human agency. Where semiotics, psychoanalytic theory and feminist theory focused attention on the textual practices that generate subjectivity, New Historicism insisted that all subjectivities and practices are local. What gets lost by their fracture--what needs better articulation and theorizing--is the process by which reading and writing figure an on-going transaction. A transactional view lets us talk about local eddies of use and re-use, even as the core matrix of a genre as a field of possible sentences, situations, or sentiments remains latently present, persistent, in its potential for future reactivations and augmentation. We argue that genre is continuously emergent in reading and in everyday performances, rather than expressing an abstract program or ideological routine, instrumentally enacted. Although a number of critics have synthesized elements of post-Marxism, deconstruction, and New Historicism in promising ways, attempts to theorize the relationship between form and history seem stalled--still suspended, perhaps, by prescriptive arrival points or the orthodoxies of each school. Post-Marxism understands forms to be determined by history; even in so subtle a version as Jameson’s interplay of structural norm, textual deviation, and “history itself,” history remains primary as the “absent cause” (pp. 145-6). For Deconstruction, textuality and history are finally opaque to each other: deconstruction inherits Maurice Blanchot’s insight that “form perhaps lives only through its transformations.” Yet it also inherits Blanchot’s resistance to potentially determining limits, including his resistance to acknowledging a history that could constrain the free play of textuality. New Historicism, for its part, puts questions of form alongside those of history, but more by means of juxtaposition or analogy than interplay. Too often such juxtapositions simply presume that the simultaneity of phenomena must be relatable – blind to the potential mutual irrelevance that grants both form and history sufficient autonomy for significance. Parallel play is read as interplay. Critical approaches to genre that relate form and history most persuasively focus on social performatives, as Rosalie Colie does in her account of how literary kinds underwrite courtly affect in the Renaissance, and more recently, as Nancy Bentley does when she traces how marriage plots underwrite American political participation. Yet such approaches still regularly leave unexamined the question of how form and history interact, in part because they understand genres as literary givens, ready to hand. Embracing a trans-historical perspective that seeks to better understand this process by taking a longer and a wider view, Wai-Chee Dimock maps literary change in terms of fractal recursions, explaining genre as a non-linear recursive system (Dimock, p. 75). Yet despite her emphasis on non-linear structures of development, her metaphors remain strongly spatial, her generic structures still fixed. Our discussion below shares something with both approaches: We put together Dimock’s interest in longitudinal perspectives and Colie and Bentley’s interest in social performatives to emphasize the dynamic liveliness of genre as prompt, social resource, and activity. Few accounts of form and history do full justice to both terms, instead reenacting the parable of the blind men and the elephant in their partial description and over-emphasis as they mistake individual elements of a larger cultural process for the whole. We seek a model that would give us a “history” more full than the pseudo-histories too often invented by literary critics and a “form” more full than the pseudo-texts too often flattened by historians. Can we find models that grant both terms genuine complexity? Reductive Marxism and positivist historicism alike take cultural context as the originating source of the “aesthetic mutations and textual complications” that constitute literary change, to use Christine Gledhill’s knotty phrase (p. 221). A mode of formalism that proves equally reductive would seal off aesthetic effects from cultural contexts altogether, seeking “coherence in a complex of attitudes dramatically related to each other,” bracketing out the genesis, interplay, and afterlives that constitute those “attitudes” (Brooks 1947, p. 224). We cite Cleanth Brooks as the characteristic example of such a dogmatic position but note, with Strier, that this is a reductive vision of Brooks’ readings – which were more deeply indebted to and embedded in historicist thinking than is commonly acknowledged. More nuanced articulations of relationships between form and history still partially misrecognize the terms. Contra Jameson’s account of structure (form) and deviation (use) as historical givens, for instance, we will argue below that form and use constitute history (Jameson, p. 146). Thus when one follows Laura Knoppers in considering how Charles I dies as a dramatic antagonist versus how he dies as a hagiographic martyr, one both enters into contemporary terms (accessing history) and avails oneself of opportunities to draft various narratives of how political events signify (participating in history). To Derrida’s claim that form and history become visible to one other only at the cost of being false to themselves or disguised by a law that belies their own processes, we would respond that form and history only can become themselves in a dialectic interrelationship that defines, not vitiates, each term. Cases like Jameson’s or Derrida’s make brilliant local moves, but continue to intimate an absent cause (History, Law, pick your capitalized Dream) for textual form. It is both more accurate and more useful to emphasize form as co-articulator of history and with history, as a feedback loop, as “practice” in the fullest sense of that term. Figuring form and history as a feedback loop crucially changes the conversation about causation: as practices produce successive orders of worlds, persons, and texts, various human actors within them (retrospectively) inquire into the question of causes--whose very nature is to be both “absent” and as variously present as the experiences of the human actors. A genuinely productive concept of genre would allow for questions about the means of interplay between history and form without reducing either to epiphenomenon, without reducing possible outcomes to necessary ones. Such a model would allow literary history to trace the gaps that material history cannot address, and it would allow literary history to tease out gaps within deceptive continuities. Such a model might be worthy of Drew Dernavich’s 2006 New Yorker cartoon, showing a worker chiseling an inscription on a Roman wall and remarking to a centurion, “This wasn’t commissioned by the emperor. This is just my random thoughts on stuff” (Figure 1). Figure 1. Drew Dernavich. Published in The New Yorker, 2/6/2006 © 2008 The New Yorker Collection from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved. This cartoon reminds us that although of course social and economic conditions position that worker behind that chisel at that moment, and determine the materials of his writing and the alphabet he uses, none of those factors absolutely limits what he might write, nor eliminates his own awareness of either the conditions under which he works or his potential to take an unexpected path. Michael Riffaterre would also remind us, however, that those “random thoughts” are also always already caught up in a sedimented and shifting net of re-membered and shifting intertexuality. We need ways to understand reading and writing in history that are at once more responsive, more active, and more nuanced than the unbounded jouissance of deconstruction, than the passive interpellation of post-Marxism, than the localized frames of New Historicism. Keeping in play notions of how form operates both in and out of history--models that speak both to historical location and to formal traditions--illuminates how form may be a player in history. Indeed, form is arguably one of the key ways for readers and writers to access and participate in history. Writing, reciting, or perhaps even silently reading an Horatian ode upon a local skirmish inscribes a history (public and political); so too does drawing an event--possibly the same event--into a history of subjective experience by rendering it with Petrarchan blazons or morality-play derived monologue. In this way, as Walter Scott explains, one interweaves one’s personal and national histories by balladeering. Performing old songs for his schoolmates after an encounter with Thomas Percy's Reliques of English Poetry, he recalls, “to read and remember [is] in this instance the same thing” (Lockhart , p. 40). On “The Ballad of Otterbourne” and ballad collection producing a feedback loop between form and history, see McLane. On Scott’s encounter with Percy, see Newman and also Perry, pp. 2-3. Form thus provides a way to make and remake the world though performing and intervening within an everyday imaginary. Form is implicitly a part of Certeau’s modeling of reading as one of the “practices of everyday life.” In Certeau’s hands, reading becomes “poaching” and attains the dynamic quality we seek in our descriptions. But Certeau has no way of allowing such poachings presence other than as momentary, tactical, durations. For him, reading as poaching leaves no permanent marks or traces on a text or the forms that it momentarily inhabits or performs. The ability to codify a genre or textual form remains the preserve of anonymous “strategic” institutions (Certeau, pp. 165-176). In “Reading as Poaching” Certeau re-describes reading as an active production of a text as opposed to a passive repetition or consumption; this modeling of reading as tactical, temporally bound and so interruptive derives, in part, from his assumption of silent reading as a dominant model. For a revision of Certeau that responds to his call to broaden the habitus of reading such that its strategic or tactical nature remains uncertain, to be reckoned with, see Chartier, 1-23. Following Certeau, we think that questions of what genre is, or where to place genre (what a category “describes” or where its objects “exist”) are less fruitful than an understanding of genre as a switching point that reveals questions of ontology and placement to be, in essence, questions of use, questions as to where and for whom this genre now operates or for what and whom it “does.” To “do” genre as a critic, then, is to allow historicist questions about local and particular protocols of reading and readers to cross-pollinate with questions about the common activity of reading as a practice of everyday life, each set of questions shaping the other. Where Certeau focuses instructively on reclaiming reading from a degraded understanding that accords it no formative powers, our present interest lies in what modeling “genre”--as the mutual conditioning of forms and readers via the “practice” of reading--enables us to think, say, write. Both readers and forms are plastic, marking and marked by one another, recruiting each other, and irrevocably changing one another by the process. Certeau gave agency to readers by modeling reading as a practice of everyday life. By “doing” genre and being “done” by it, we seek to understand how reading, and being read, renders both us and the things we name “books” lively. # # # Formalist thought has often imagined literary forms as things, with qualities, properties, and shapes that writers and readers encounter. Imagined this way, forms are dropped, picked up, refined, and handed off at different times and under different cultural pressures. Form serves critics as a backdrop against which textual and social developments can be measured, and as a metric for tracking them. Thus, the novel reveals emergent modernity; epic demonstrates pressure points between residual and emergent socio-cultural orders; post-modern pastiche unpacks fractures in Cartesian consciousness. How does the conversation change when we think of genres as inherently mobile, plastic at every moment? To imagine genres as synchronically dynamic, we need to focus on how they form texts and how they form us. Constructing genres more in terms of process than of template or taxonomy--more as action than as object--requires us to reframe a host of elegant noun labels (sonnet) as clunky transitive verbs (I sonnet this day, I sonnetize your silence and my doubts). As the OED informs, the word sonnet was throughout the sixteenth and for much of the seventeenth century both noun and verb. The exercise is grammatically inelegant but useful, because it allows us to imagine writers, in turn, not as casting about for apposite forms so much as being caught, ensonneted, played by a sonnet. Forms actively shape experiences, enable readings, and expressions. Necessarily, of course, writing changes forms over time in a feedback loop that begins to seem organic. Thinking of genre in this transactional framework invites a thought experiment along the lines of Michael Pollan’s evolutionary hypothesis that grass thrives because it has adapted humans: we help grasses compete in their battle with the trees by mowing the lawn. Julian Yates has pursued such a mode of literary analysis, tracing how objects collect networks of users whose uses (and misuses) continue to make them legible (and remake them) over time. Might we, at least experimentally, consider how epithalamion or, more complicatedly, elegy, has adapted its readers to desire, effect and textually propagate its occasions? Might we put more pressure on how poetic modes--Petrarchism, say--continue to provide popular emotion scripts even as historical context varies (Vickers and Greene)? Might we attend more closely to formal structures--plot, for instance--and how they both shape and are shaped by readers and writers (Brückner and Poole)? Consider Peter Brooks’ work on plot as process and action, as a “structuring operation” enacted and developed in the varied temporal spaces of textual production most broadly construed (writing, reading, re-reading, remembering) (Brooks 1984, p. 11). Such earlier narratological theory models a way of thinking through genre more broadly, by rejecting a division of agency that has come to look natural in its familiarity: humans, or historical forces, use and shape forms. We could locate a seemingly blatant example of this in George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), where the author trains his genteel readers to master rhyme scheme by composing poetry with a compass in hand. The fantasy of precisely, geometric, authorially-controlled poetic structure is exploded, however, when Puttenham includes a model inherited from Chaucer, or when we recognize his text’s indebtedness to new translations of Euclid, or when we recognize the reciprocity of the surveyor’s plat and the new-fangled notion of the theatrical plot. To borrow Puttenham’s own phrase, we find here a confluence of working genres that, far from conferring human agency, engage each other and authors “by enterweauing one with another by knots” (Puttenham, p. ## quoted in Brückner and Poole, p. 629 ff.). The fruits of a model that de-naturalizes that division of labor, inviting us to imagine how forms may use us, could be many. Such a model would emphasize how forms allow users to do things, at once shaping those users and enabling them to become more fully themselves. Such “selves” must be understood in part through their performance of the moves enabled by various available forms. Subjects inhabit the local formulations of elegy, melodrama, advertisement, that is, as much as the grander formations of capitalism, maternity, citizenship. In this sense, form offers an operational middle term that keeps both “literature” and “history” irreducibly in motion. And by foregrounding that motion, we can explore the interplay of forms, users, and the uses they sponsor: by imagining form as habitus, as operation, as practice. For an attempt to do this with Shakespeare’s Sonnets see, Yates (2011). Bruno Latour’s description of what it means to make something--to write or read a book, for example--offers a model for the kind of distributed agency we have in mind: Whenever we make something we are not in command, we are slightly overtaken by the action: every builder knows that. Thus the paradox of constructivism is that it uses a vocabulary of mastery that no architect, mason, city planner, or carpenter would ever use. Are we fooled by what we do? Are we controlled, possessed, alienated? No, not always, not quite. That which overtakes us is also, because of our agency, because of the clinamen of our action, slightly overtaken, modified. Am I simply restating the dialectic? No, there is no object, no subject, no contradiction, no Aufhebung, no mastery, no recapitulation, no spirit, no alienation. But there are events. I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do, by the chance to mutate, to change, and to bifurcate, the chance that I and the circumstances surrounding me offer to that which has been invited, recovered, welcomed. (Latour, p. 1999b: 281) Latour’s “surprise” or mutation may be an effect of the weather, of a particular local event. But it is also the place where the structure of a “form” as pattern, as chains of use and re-use, makes itself felt. Whereas previous literary-historical discussions attribute observed mutations to ideology, to genius, to the errancy of language, or to any single master cause, Latour broadens this notion of movement. Drawing on the Lucretian model of the clinamen or swerve as the origin of action, for Latour, this movement becomes a mutation that exceeds the force or intention of any individual human agent or any particular system. Applied to genre, we could imagine such mutations as chains of making and use in which author, text, reader, and genres themselves claim a partial share of the agency required to make, write, read. This model of genre transformation acknowledges all the actors that contribute to the phenomenon of a “text” appearing in your hands now, without vesting any of them with full intention, knowledge, or efficacy. For a discussion of the Lucretian clinamen as a cultural form see Serres. To talk about the agency of form, or take a form’s-eye view of literary history (or indeed history), is to make explicit the connection between ways that textual forms operate and ways that other forms of everyday life operate. Consider for example some analogies among bus routes, recipes, and elegies. Each encodes a certain directionality, an intentionality that is entailed in adopting them and is the reason we use them. Bus route #39 takes you to particular places (past the café perhaps where this or that desirable waiter works, if you’re “poaching”); a recipe enables you to make a particular soup (one that promises to return you to a childhood Wednesday); an elegy manages particular affects (one might also hope to impress a potential patron). To go other places or do other things, one would use different forms: drive Interstate 295, stage melodramatic reunions, respond to an op-ed. Our abstract locution of “using” the bus (rather than “taking” or “riding” it), helps get around the problem of constructivism that Latour identifies. “Using” the bus foregrounds the bus route or even the bus’s movement rather than the particular vehicle, stressing the bus’s operation as a repeatable form used by multiple, specific riders with multiple, specific intentions. Thus, in a similar mode, Renaissance writers understood “elegy” variously as a social and emotional vehicle: a recipe for consolation that, correctly followed, cooks spiritual commitment out of grief; a gentlemanly emotion script that demonstrates strong feelings mastered; a physiological therapy for the release of excessive humors; a lyric standard for literary improvisation; and so on (Rowe, 2003). Foregrounding the agency of form also lets us talk about form diachronically: active form does not prevent a literary history so much as inflect its terms. In this sense, forms are sedimented uses (encoded memories, realized habits) that in turn guide further use--the latter at once adopting and adapting the directionality and intentionality of the former. In the realm of transportation, before super-highways, early American roads followed Indian paths, which in turn followed animal migratory routes, which in turn were guided by features of terrain and landscape. Old roads re-formulate ancient animal habits; agency here seems distributed between the formalization of old uses and habits (a road) and present use (taking that particular road). In Philadelphia, trolleys shared roads with automobiles and carriages for a time, were retired for most of a century, and just have been reintroduced--for some of the same reasons they were used in the 1920s, and for some different reasons. Those different reasons, moreover, include rereading 1920s uses; in a relationship of 2010 to 1925, trolleys feel retro, pre-post-modern, nostalgic. Independent of such rereading, in 2010, trolleys have been adopted also because they are efficient, clean, and flexible. A variety of literary examples show analogous recycling, as genres cross multiple fields and operate in various cultural registers. Thus, as Renaissance scholars have attested, the genre of romance migrates across verse and prose, psychology and politics (Helgerson). In songs of Provençal troubadours, romance articulates chivalric social formations (Kay). In The Faerie Queene, it articulates a myth of national origins at a moment of imperial aspirations (Fuchs). In Gothic novels, it articulates psycho-social transgression (Haggerty, Sedgwick). In late twentieth-century fiction, romance articulates nostalgia for arcane knowledge and secret histories (Keen). These examples track the paths of a genre perpetually redirected, refocused, repurposed. Each recycling at once evokes and adapts the tradition. Since the forms one adopts are the effects of previous uses and adaptations, formalist analysis must simultaneously investigate the sedimentation of uses into forms, and the uses of those forms. Foregrounding “use” and “form” as versions of each other (one uses particular forms; forms are effects of particular uses) offers a way to talk about that loop of use, reuse, and misuse that is the analytic object of historical formalism. Emphasizing form’s activity allows literary analysis to situate textual filiations--the templates and typologies, or borders and landscapes, of previous approaches--within larger “ecologies” of reading and writing. This critical stance posits all elements of reading, writing, and indeed history as fluid, relational, and (perhaps most important) coevolving. Just as biologists have supplemented questions about when and how dinosaurs went extinct with questions of how dinosaurs survive (in the form of birds), genre scholars might explore where and in what forms such practices as commonplacing survive: from practices of quotation and reading recorded in the form of the essay to the bookmarks or “favorites” in our browsers, to videos sampled via RSS feed on YouTube. Framed in terms of an evolving set of practices, this set of platforms reveals how different forms sponsor particular skills, modes of thought, and perhaps even cognitive processes. When one bookmarks, one practices similar selection, emphasis, revisitation, extraction, as early modern commonplace writers did. Commonplace books were a delivery format, that is, that both addressed and carried forward the needs, skills and desires online readers now bring to electronic delivery formats. Understood in the active sense of “form,” then, commonplacing shapes specific social literacies: an expectation to situate one’s own thinking in conversations with others over long spans of time; a requirement (or not) of named credit and precise transcription; a habit of repeated revisits to familiar formulations, and so on. On this principle, in reconstructing historical cultural fields, form becomes the primary material, the place where cultural self-understanding offers its terms. Reconstructive work based on this active sense of form reveals, for instance, that the practice of commonplacing articulates not only the more obviously homologous activities like bookmarking, but also informs the development of the essay, the novel, and the journal (Black). Forms offer emotion scripts, organizing tropes, or lexica of experience, proffering protocols of reading. These formal repertoires weave both in and out of history in a variety of ways; attending to the weave enables deeply historical readings, insofar as form contains latent possibilities that may be visible at some times, invisible at others. Jonathan Gil Harris’s notion of palimpsested time is useful here, as is the textual example he provides to illustrate the idea: a goatskin manuscript that contains a fifth-century Greek treatise on hydraulics overwritten by a thirteenth-century monastic scribe writing of the Orthodox liturgy and in turn by a twentieth-century forger adding faux-Byzantine images, all rendering the document “flagrantly polychromic” (Harris, p. 13). Such polychonicity has implications for how we understand “history” itself. In a slightly different model we find equally helpful, John Rogers suggests we think of any particular historical moment as an instance when a panoply of historical possibilities all register simultaneously, shortly to be reduced to what actually transpired historically. Rogers reminds us that the false teleology of extrapolating from historical event (which we often retrospectively oversimplify by generalizing the experience of one group onto a larger population) to historical inevitability (for everyone) often obscures our understanding of what reading or writing a text may have meant at a given moment. The kind of formal analysis we advocate helps us see that the evolution of history through form resists specific “inevitabilities,” not least because any given text operates through multiple forms: as romance and treatise at the same time, for instance, or as joke and oration. Moreover, different contemporaneous genres may respond to the same historical circumstances while inflecting them in very different ways, a fact that underscores form’s action in the swerve of historical change. This makes the history of forms more a history of evolving uses than the unfolding of an inherent logic, as Lauren Shohet has demonstrated in her study of the great variety of uses, both purposeful and serendipitous, for which even so apparently tendentious a genre as the Stuart court masque proved amenable. Deceptively “inherent” logics (the triumph of Cartesian rationality, Whig political history, secularization) are the names given after the fact of use. They name the filiations of various contingent uses. A record of specific uses offers one important element in a genre’s history but does not tell the whole story. If formal criticism collects questions about how text, audience, and context form a distributed system of cultural agency, its most capacious articulations need to begin to answer those questions. The current moment seems ripe for drawing upon existing work that explicates the dynamics of feedback loops between form and history. Kenneth Burke, for one, promisingly articulated the notion of form as critical concepts in action. Yet since Burke, those theorists who have not succumbed to overemphasizing a sole element of the irreducible text / audience / context triad still tend to leave the performatives of a cultural poetics remarkably vague. Foregrounding how forms are performed reveals no hidden subterfuge in history, no historical unconscious, no secret design of ideology. Or, rather, it reveals all these things to be true depending on how different readers--some considered full agents in their historical moments, others not--are distributed by and through the feedback loop. For an account of reading as “using” congenial to our understanding of form, history, and agency, see Christensen. This approach reveals culture as a collective and conscious (if not docile or predictable) activity. Returning to the example of romance (and anti-romance), Cervantes’s Don Quixote offers one of the clearest theories of reading in this mode, by registering the feedback loops of form and history while inviting a self-conscious readerly canniness about participating in those loops. Don Quixote, that is, at once critiques, performs, and provokes the free play of reading and its consequences. The specific consequences of Quixote’s reading are painfully emeshed in his local history, but the novel itself teases us to perform the same mistakes in reading about them. We learn the dangers of immersive, impassioned reading by following the same recipe (or indeed by following characters, like the Duke and Duchess, who entertain themselves by following the script of Quixote’s reading mistakes), realizing again the recurrent mistakes the novel recursively mocks. Don Quixote suggests that historical forms, reading, and lived experience are mutually dependent, but not fully determining of each other. And in providing readers with a strange loop that reminds us of our own variously compounding activities in activating texts—reading critically, reading for pleasure, reading to poach a space in which to live—the novel not only reflects on its protagonist’s original adventures in anachronism, but asks its readers to reflect in turn on their own loopy participation in those processes: to live with them, so to speak, and perhaps even Quixotically. ### If “form,” actively conceived, offers an operational middle term between literature and history, genre offers an operational middle term between abstractions and specifics. “Genre” names both the way one specifies such abstractions as “comedy” and the sets of expectations and uses writers and readers wield as ways to access and repurpose those abstractions. When one carefully attends to genre, it reminds us that, pace high deconstruction, one doesn’t “Read”: one reads some thing in some way. Conversely, thoughtfully encountered genre reminds one that, pace post-Marxism and New Historicism, one doesn’t just follow texts, but reads them (quirkily, dialogically, sometimes Quixotically). Genres invite taxonomy (in analysis, in reception) but they also frustrate it because their transactional nature means they are always emergent. The prevailing critical metaphors for describing genre, as collections of properties or critical maps for the industry, attempt to fix the activities and the practices by which past uses materially and formally affect current ones. The names of genres track where and when users have taken up a given form’s invitations, and where and when that form mutates during its use. Such inhabitations of form (poachings, in Certeau’s vocabulary) by the great variety of users are at once the mechanism of genre and the substance of history. Genre works by instructing users in a mode of interpretation--for literary genres, a mode of reading. These modes of reading, in turn, drive history, which then might be termed the success of those poachers whose generic inhabitations cease to be tactical and become strategic, marking the genre itself as a visible or legible record. Consequently, “literary history” names the effects of the readings that genre teaches its users to perform, reform and deform. These users are what we miss if we look only to “deduc[e] . . . from the form of an object the forces that have been at work" (Moretti 2005, p. 57). What we call the history of a genre might also be thought of as a performance history, or a record of its uses. Rick Altman helpfully has argued that forms constitute reception communities, establishing shared horizons of expectation having to do with the contours and contents of specific fictional worlds. Yet, as Todorov observes, new examples of any given genre do not so much answer audience expectations as elaborate, realign, and adapt them; the changing historical corpus of a genre continually adjusts the provisional idea of that genre as an abstraction. Formalist analysis, then, offers a powerful historical instrument because it is so well adapted to foregrounding the mutations of genre. When formal analysis reveals the way genre calls on and exceeds taxonomy, it opens a window on the pressures in feedback loops of genre and history. Emphasizing the mutuality of form and history positions criticism to ask what it might mean to say that people do a given genre, in specific cultural sites and gestures, including those of the everyday. To what kinds of symbolic actions and uses are genres put in these contexts? Raising these questions moves our conceptions of genre beyond prescriptions, but not so far as abstractions. This might help us recognize the hermeneutics of genre as modalities of both reading and everyday experience. Conritibutor’s note: Scott Black, Nora Johnson, Laura McGrane, Steve Newman, Kristen Poole, Katherine Rowe, Lauren Shohet, and Julian Yates share an interest in form and history and have convened in the Philadelphia area to think together since 1998. Works Cited Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Black, Scott. Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in Poetic Form. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot, Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984. 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