The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

predicated on the ‘natural’ sex, it is
gender performativity that determines our
very apprehension of sexed bodies. Thus,
in Gender Trouble, Butler elaborates upon
Ortner’s earlier equation:
gender is not to culture as sex is to
nature; gender is also the discursive/
cultural means by which ‘sexed
nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced
and established as ‘prediscursive’,
prior to culture, a politically neutral
surface on which culture acts. This
[is the] construction of sex as the
radically unconstructed.
Of course, like other theorists who seek to
disrupt the persistent dualism of gender
as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, Butler
attempts to QUEER the binarism of a
hegemonic ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.
Adrienne Rich’s essay of 1987, ‘Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence’, which outlined the notion of a
‘continuum’ of modes of being in relation
to gender – and thus to sex – is an important
precursor to Butler’s work, as is
Monique Wittig’s ‘One is Not Born a
Woman’ (1981), in which she claims lesbians
refuse not only the ‘role’ of woman
but the whole heterosexual matrix – ‘the
economic, ideological and political power
of man’ – by which society operates.
Lesbians are thus not women.
See David Glover and Cora Kaplan,
Genders (2000); Joseph Bristow,
Sexuality (1997); Shelley Saguaro (ed.),
Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader
(2000).
SS
Generative poetics See POETICS.
Genre There is no agreed equivalent
for this word in the vocabulary of English
criticism. ‘Kind’, ‘type’, ‘form’ and
‘genre’ are variously used, and this fact
alone indicates some of the confusions
Genre 97
that surround the development of the
theory of genres. The attempt to classify
or describe literary works in terms of
shared characteristics was begun by
Aristotle in the Poetics, and the first
sentence of his treatise suggests the two
main directions genre theory was to follow:
Our subject being poetry, I propose to
speak not only of the art in general,
but also of its species and their respective
capacities; of the structure of
plot required for a good poem; of the
number and nature of the constituent
parts of a poem; and likewise of any
other matters on the same line of
enquiry.
Classical genre theory is regulative and
prescriptive, and is based on certain fixed
assumptions about psychological and
social differentiation. Modern genre
theory, on the other hand, tends to be
purely descriptive and to avoid any overt
assumptions about generic hierarchies. In
the last century, beginning with such
Russian Formalists as Roman Jakobson,
there has been a continuing effort to link
literary kinds to linguistic structures.
Vladimir Propp’s seminal study, Morphology
of the Folktale, written in 1928, was
strongly influenced by the Formalists,
and he in turn laid some of the groundwork
for the genre studies of the later
Structuralists in both film and literary
criticism. Tzvetan Todorov, however, in
his book The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre (1973),
takes issue with Propp’s attempt to relate
the concept of genre to that of ‘species’
in the natural sciences. Todorov points out
that, unlike specimens in the natural
world, every true literary work modifies
the sum of all possible works, and that we
only grant a text literary status insofar as
it produces a change in our notion of the
canon. If a work fails to achieve this,