Genres of Popular Fiction and the Mechanics of Cognitive Recognition

In the article, the author researches sociocultural and cognitive aspects of literary genres. From sociocultural perspective, genres function as social ‘pacts’ that enable communication between actors of literature as a social institute (writers, readers, critics, publishers, and distributors). From cognitive perspective, genres are viewed as cognitive frames that exist in readers’ consciousness, influence readers’ responses during the acts of reception, and orient readers in the imaginary world of a text. In contemporary scientific and public discussions of genres, two levels are usually confused: the level of social positioning and the level of reception. Literary critics and scholars tend to use the rhetoric technique of defining through negation-they prove the ‘exclusivity’ of a text, its high aesthetic quality, and high position in cultural hierarchy by excluding it from any categories. However, on the level of reception there are no non-categorized texts-any text is a member of a group or a category. In the act of reception, readers correlate a text with a generic ‘prototype’ according to the principle of ‘family resemblance’. In the article, the author argues that sociocultural and cognitive levels should be viewed as separate, but not isolated from each other-they are dialectically interconnected. The article focuses on genres of popular fiction. Their functioning is inseparable from the market: they formed as industrial ‘niches’ on literary markets in Russia, Europe, and the USA in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. At that time, those niches received their ‘generic names’ that were associated with the lists of literary texts, social stereotypes, and notions of their social and cultural meanings. Readers’ acquaintance with a genre is a dynamic process-it includes reading of literary texts associated with the genre in the field of literary production, adoption of repetitive ideas of the genre, and development of cognitive skills of reading generic texts, i.e. orientation in the textual space and decoding it. In readers’ consciousness, genres function as cognitive frames of reception-they coordinate readers’ interpretative efforts and aesthetic evaluation of a text. The author shares the results of empirical observations based on an experiment: the participants were offered to read the first paragraphs of F. Kafka’s Metamorphosis from the lens of different genres (detective fiction, science fiction, and horror). This experiment demonstrated how different generic stereotypes activate models and habits of reception relevant for different situations.

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