The Genre of Trolls - Doria

ounded texts with strong social and historical associations, while at the
same time rendering texts fragmented, heterogeneous and open-ended due
to their dependence on other discursive formations and contextual factors
for the interpretation, production and reception of discourse (cf. Hanks
1989: 104–105). This conception of genre differs on several points from that
proposed by Lauri Honko in a number of influential articles (Honko 1968,
1971, 1976, 1981, 1989). Firstly, the taxonomy of the genre system and definition
of individual genres is not as prominent a reasearch object in Briggs
and Bauman’s theory as in Honko’s, and secondly, Briggs and Bauman are
less concerned with the communicative specialization of genres advocated
by Honko, stressing the political implications of genres instead.
The invocation of a genre provides a textual model for creating cohesion
and coherence within a text, but just as important as the structural effects is
the process itself, entextualization. In an earlier treatment of this topic
(1990), Briggs and Bauman describe entextualization as the act of producing
a unit, a text, that can be extracted from the surrounding flow of discourse
(Bauman & Briggs 1990: 73). Entextualization is also a recontextualization:
whenever a generic model is utilized, the narrator actively reconstructs and
reconfigures genre by selecting and abstracting certain characteristics and
glossing over others, which results in a decontextualization, and the narrator
then recontextualizes the text in another context (Briggs & Bauman
1992: 147–149). This point has been challenged by Lauri Honko, who
questions the idea that a text can be decontextualized at all (Honko 1998:
149–151). A complete decontextualization would certainly seem unjustified
to posit, and that was hardly Briggs and Bauman’s intention. Generic features
still have associations, despite being subjected to generalization and
abstraction, and to decontextualization. Moreover, as Briggs and Bauman
acknowledge, entextualization can carry previous contexts within itself,
thus chronicling the text’s history of use (Bauman & Briggs 1990: 73–75).
To my mind, the utility of this approach lies in its highlighting of the transformation
of a text in performance, and of the constructed character of the
relation of the text to other renditions of a story.
Briggs and Bauman further develop the imperfect fit between text and
generic model by introducing the concept of intertextual gaps. Their formulation
is worthy of quoting, as it captures the gist of their argument in a
few sentences:
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Genre, Parody, Chronotopes and Novelization: the Wonder Tales of Johan Alén