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Generic Studies: Their Renewed Importance in Religious and Literary Interpretation
Mary Gerhart (Ph.D University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York. She is a coeditor of Religious Studies Review and has published articles in The Journal of Religion. The Thomist, and Renascence.
In recent years, the need for a critique of "reader" as rigorous as that which has been developed for "text" and for "author" has become increasingly acute. Whether in the study of religion as story and biography or in interpretative reading in general, a critical notion of reader is essential if the act of reading is to be anything other than mere consumption of texts. Some new way of understanding the hermeneutical circle is required to avert the narcissism latent in the Anselmian model.
The notion of "genre" as developed by four recent theorists is helpful in the task of constructing a critique of "reader." E. D. Hirsch, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Tzvetán Todorov, and Paul Ricoeur have each surpassed the idealist notion of genre as a classificatory device and developed in its place the notion of genre as a generative pinciple.
Todorov, for example, illustrates how "form" is a theoretical, as distinct from a descriptive or explanatory, issue According to both Hirsch and Todorov, somewhere between empirical details and metaphysical thematizations lie generic formulations which can assist the reader to organize his/her response to the text and to recognize the probable understanding toward which the conventions of the text are directed.
In Gadamer's theory of interpretation, the notion of genre acquires historicity. After Gadamer, genres can no longer be regarded as timeless a priori categories. Rather, because they are constituted by historical reflections, their rise and decline are intrinsic to text-interpretation.
Finally, in Ricoeur's theory that generic considerations are correlative principles of production and interpretation, we find a basis for understanding genre as praxis. If we understand reading to be isomorphic to authoring, it becomes clear that the reader can no longer be regarded as the self-evident recipient of text-signification. Genre, in Ricoeur's theory, transforms "speech" into a "work" and points toward a new notion of "reader" as one whose reconstruction of the text is the condition for the possibility of its being a story that "gives life."
This notion of "reader" makes possible a new model of the hermeneutical circle—one which signifies the essential roles of critical thought which follows naive reading and of informed understanding which follows after thought.