E-Book Content
The Boundaries of Genre The Boundaries of Genre Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia BY GARY SAUL MORSON NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS, EVANSTON, IL NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 60201 Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press. Northwestern University Press paper back edition published by arrangement with University of Texas Press. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America For my parents, David and Shirley Morson, and to the memory of my grandmother, Minnie Estrin Contents Preface 1. Dostoevsky’s Icon of Chaos ix 3 A Work of Paradoxes, 3; Poetics of the Underground, 8; Stories That Cannot Be Told, 9; Annexing the Boundaries: Sketch and Feuilleton, 14; “A Petersburg Chronicle,” 17; “Petersburg Visions in Prose and Verse,” 20; Winter Remarks on Summer Impressions, 22; Transforming the Periodical into Literature, 26; Literature as Algorithm, 30; Dostoevsky’s Utopianism, 33 2. Threshold Art 39 Literature, 39; Fiction, 44; Boundary Works, 48; Threshold Literature, 49; Framing: Shklovsky’s Zoo, 51; “The Journal as a Literary Form,” 56; Reading between the genres: The Dairy as Metaliterature, 58 3. Utopia as a Literary Genre 69 Identifying a Class, 69; Criteria for Literary Utopias, 74; The Literary Significance of Nonliteraty Utopias, 78; An Intra generic Dialogue: The Status of Women, 79; An Inter-generic Dialogue: The Nature and Proper Function of Literature, 81; Structure: Questions and Answers, 84; Structure: Dream and Reality, 86; The Masterplot, 88; Utopia as Threshold Art, 92; The Poetics of Didactic Literature and Fiction, 94; Reading as Journey, 96; The Self-Implicating Question, 97; What Is to Be Done? and What Is to Be Inferred, 99; Periodical Apocalypse, 104 4. Recontextualizations PART 1 : Theory of Parody Parody and Intertextuality, 107; Criteria, 110; The Etiology of Utterance, 113 107 107 PART 2: Anti-utopia as a Parodic Genre Anti-genres, 115; Parody and History, 118; Certainties and Skepticisms, 120; Counterplot #1; Systems and Labyrinths, 121; Counterplot #2: The Madman, 124; Questions and Inquisitors, 125; Counterplot #3: Escape to the Cave, 128; We and the Rebirth of the Novel, 133; Anti-utopian Metafiction, 135; Utopia, Anti-utopia, and Their Readers, 138 115 PART 3: Meta-utopia Metaparody, 142; “Each Commenting on the Other”: Wells’ A Modern Utopia, 146; Dialogue: The Tempest and From the Other Shore, 155; Ambiguous Framing: Diderot’s Supplement to Bouganville’s “Voyage", 162; More’s Utopia'. Texts and Readings, 164; The Diary'. Generic Risks, 175; The Diary'. Belief in the Incredible, 177 142 Notes 187 Index 209 Preface Faced with centuries of contradictory genre theories, some have despaired, others synthesized. From Giordano Bruno to Croce (and after), generic skeptics have held that the particularities of texts defy the generalities of classification systems, that it is in principle possible to classify texts in an indefinitely large number of ways, and that new works (or the rediscovery of old ones) inevitably render obsolete all existing or conceivable systems. To these objections it has been answered that innovation is identifiable as such only if norms are presumed, that even the frustration of expectations depends on their presence, and that interpretation itself is inconceivable without prior experience of works similar in some respects. For a text to be truly sui generis, it has been suggested, its readers (and author) would have to lack a biography. The variability of genres, it is concluded, argues not for the abandonment of g