IPW 2010

Michael Sinding (University of Giessen)

I would like to examine studies of the genre of Gravity’s Rainbow to develop aspects of a cognitive view of genre. Specifically, I want to show how a cognitive view of categorization helps clarify how texts can participate in multiple genres and can mix several genres. I respond to certain recurring assumptions, in recent work on genre, about the nature of categories and categorization, elaborating on John Frow’s incisive critique of misconceptions of genre.

I then draw on Gregory Murphy’s survey of concept and category research to review the demise of the “classical” definitional view of categories, and sketch the three main contemporary theories of categorization that arose subsequently. These theories may be commensurable, insofar as they tend to focus on a particular aspect or factor of categorization, rather than offering conflicting views of the same aspect. The exemplar view says that people learn and use specific remembered examples. Encountering a new bird (or novel), we access many or all memories of specific birds (or novels); and we compare them to the new item for similarity (Murphy 80). The prototype view says we learn an abstract summary representation of the whole category—and classify by comparing new items to the prototype (95). For example, in the (Western) prototype for bird, necessary features would include that it is a kind of animal, with feathers; default features, that birds fly; and optional features would specify colour, size, shape, etc. The knowledge view says that we learn and use concepts as “part of our overall understanding of the world around us”; this relation works both ways: concepts are influenced by what we already know, but new concepts can alter our general knowledge (60). Such knowledge seems to consist in simplified “theories” which guide processes of attention, learning and reasoning—about properties, category relations, etc. Knowledge of birds includes relations like: how feathers are parts of wings; that both enable birds to fly, so they can make nests in trees, migrate long distances, etc.

Against this background, I briefly review the very many genres that have been attributed to Gravity’s Rainbow, then look in detail at the thinking behind three influential generic framings of the text, and what the text can tell us about the nature of categories and how people use them. These three are: Edward Mendelson’s claim that GR is an “encyclopaedic narrative”; Theodore Kharpertian’s claim that it is a “Menippean satire”; and M. Keith Booker’s claim that it is after all a “novel.” Rather than enter into debate with these analyses directly, I first take them as evidence for how people think with genre categories. (This case is particularly revealing about how experts think with and use categories to understand and experience very rich and complex realities.) As such, they offer valuable information for questions about theories of categories and genres:

1. information about patterns of category thinking (efforts to match a complex text with a complex genre, i.e. to identify “the” genre of Gravity’s Rainbow);

2. information about the interplay of factors in genre categories—exemplars, prototypes, and knowledge (the role of the historical sequence of exemplars in genres);

3. information about the role and interplay of category factors in genre mixture (how genres mixed in Gravity’s Rainbow are represented).

I conclude by reflecting on how this new understanding of categorization can help clarify critical aims and principles in using genre to understand Pynchon’s texts, and also clarify Pynchon’s use of genres in constructing those texts.

 
Works Cited

Murphy, Gregory L. The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.