Since it began publication at
On
behalf of Genre’s editorial
board, I want to assure all our readers that our alliance with Duke University
Press will in no way constrain or restrict our editorial independence; our
peer-review process will be unaffected and our standards for acceptance will
remain rigorous. The new resources that this alliance makes available to us
promise to open up opportunities that would have been unthinkable before. We
will continue to chart our own course as we have for the past forty-three
years, and we encourage you to participate in our project as readers,
reviewers, contributors and guest editors according to the terms of our
editorial mandate:
While
maintaining a longstanding interest in the conventions and discursive histories
of generic forms, we at Genre intend
to emphasize more fully the intricate relations between genre and its social,
institutional, cultural and political contexts. We aim to stress the
broad range of material affiliations that activate generic form in a dynamic
field of socio-historical and discursive practices. This orientation has
several components. To begin with, it signals an interest in nonliterary
as well as literary discourses, in visual, musical, filmic or architectural
artifacts, as well as written texts. It encourages explorations of
"high" and "low" art forms, including their relation to
mass and popular culture. In broader terms, its goal is to stimulate a
variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to genre and its
social functions. Our outlook promotes historical perspectives on genre,
including efforts to evaluate the merits of previous approaches to genre and
compare them with those of more recent formulations. Finally, it
highlights an explicit concern with the theoretical, institutional or political
dimensions of discourse, a concern that includes international perspectives on
genre.
We
encourage work that studies the relation between discursive forms and cultural
formations without taking for granted either of the terms of our
subtitle--discourse or culture. The word discourse encompasses the
entire range of possible written, visual and auditory generic forms, while
culture registers the suggestive convergence of artistic, social and
institutional practices. But both terms, rather
than setting out secured categories or signaling a particular critical
perspective, are intended as markers of general terrain whose contours should
be reexamined, and whose borders will undoubtedly be disputed and
redefined. Over the last four decades, the study of genre as cultural
discourse has been pursued in many individual articles published by Genre, as
well as in virtually every special issue we have commissioned, from The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in
the Renaissance (1982) to Narratives
and New Media (2008).
The
journal has consistently striven to be responsive to recent critical
developments, especially those in the disciplines of literature and language
study. Our perspective is best summarized in the term "cultural
studies," provided that the term is understood in its broadest
sense. It draws upon work related to feminist, gender, gay and lesbian,
multi-ethnic, post-colonial and globalization studies, as well as the varieties
of cultural materialist, Marxist and New Historicist criticism, particularly
those that have taken up the challenges to traditional ideas of aesthetic and
political representation posed by structuralist,
poststructuralist and postmodernist critique. To a great extent, this
diverse body of work has challenged older historical or humanist approaches,
but it also shares with its predecessors a general perception of the importance
of history. That emphasis has, in turn, reestablished genre as a crucial
category of study, though now the relation between individual texts and larger
discursive and social networks has been taken in new conceptual, cultural and
international directions. With that in mind, the journal invites articles
that treat genre, conceived as any regularity in discourse or culture, from all
theoretical perspectives.
* * *
The
preceding three paragraphs constitute a revised and condensed version of the
statement of editorial principles announced in issue XXV:1
of Genre (spring 1992). Those
principles, composed by the editorial collective, are still very much in force,
after eighteen years that have seen the widespread adoption of similar
principles by a substantial fraction of scholars in the humanities and allied disciplines.
What, then, now sets Genre apart from
other forums for critical work?
First,
a willingness to push the boundaries of accepted interdisciplinarity
further, to construct pathways from literary and cultural artifacts not only to
the oft-visited terrains of history, political science, psychology, and
philosophy, but also to those more seldom mapped, like music and architecture,
and even to those that lie seemingly beyond the fields we know: the physical
sciences and mathematics. If there is a genre of scholarship best suited
for the work that Genre seeks to
encourage and publish, it is the travelers' tale. But where traditional
travelers' tales are credulous, critical travelers' tales must be skeptical;
where traditional travelers' tales are exoticist, taking
one culture as a center of reference in order to distance the other, critical
travelers' tales must be decentered. But these
important distinctions should not obscure the essential continuity that
justifies the metaphor: all travelers' tales, the critical as well as the
traditional, are constituted by a voyage out and a voyage in. Whether we
call this structure dialectical or differential, we must acknowledge that, done
well, it produces a form of counter-illumination of each terrain by the other
and of both by their relation that is the goal of all truly interdisciplinary
work.
Second,
Genre sets itself apart through our
determination to be a point of passage for debates taking place not only in
many disciplines, but in many languages and locales as well. While
Genre's languages of publication will continue to be the varieties of English,
the journal will also make space available for translations of important
critical and theoretical texts published around the globe. Since no
editorial group, no matter how large and dedicated it may be, can remain
current with all debates in all places, we call upon our contributors and
readers to supplement the editors' efforts by suggesting relevant texts for
translation or, preferably, by submitting translations as well as original
articles for review. Such translations may form the nuclei of special
issues or stand on their own in our general issues.
We
hope you will follow the reports of our critical travels, and send us news of
your own.
Timothy S. Murphy
General Editor
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