How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 2 (2000) Issue 2 Article 3 How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses Johan F. Hoorn Vrije University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Recommended Citation Hoorn, Johan F. "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses." 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This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Volume 2 Issue 2 (June 2000) Article 3 Johan F. Hoorn, "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss2/3> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.2 (2000) <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss2/> Abstract: In his article, "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses," Johan F. Hoorn discusses that in genre theory, the creation of a genre is usually envisioned as a complex selection procedure in which several factors play an equivocal role. First, he advances that genre usually is investigated at the level of the phenomenon. For instance, questions may drawn on the effects of social status, education, or "intrinsic values" on forming a genre, on an author's decision with regard to in which genre to express his/her creativity. Second, Hoorn attempts to formulate a general mechanism that explains the forming of groups of genres. His hypotheses of genre formation includes the notion that if one hypothesis fails, the next would come into operation. Hoorn's proposal includes the notion of how to construct and to employ set theoretical and combinatory principles for word-frequency distributions as a mathematical representation of human behavior in the selection process of genre formation. Because the five hypotheses are strictly quantitative and not dependent on particular factors, they are open to testing under any experimental condition. Johan F. Hoorn, "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.2 (2000): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss2/3> Johan F. HOORN How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses In the empirical study of literature, the "inherent" qualities of a work are not much in evidence to explain the text's levels of interpretation and classification. The meaning of a book is, supposedly, a construction of readers and genre labeling in a process of concept-driven activity. However, in this process prior knowledge about the writer's work and the need of librarians to organize available space appears to be more important than the indications one can construe from the work itself (see Van Rees 140). True as this may be, I advance the idea that despite the variability of the reader's construction of meaning, readers can also find common ground. They can decide to categorize the same books in the same way on the basis of word-frequency distributions, that is, the number of times a word is mentioned in a book. For example, in novels of romance, the word "love" will be mentioned more often than in handbooks for car repair. Taking this basic approach, I attempt here to revive the traditional idea that data-driven processes can contribute to genre identification and -- as a new notion and proposition -- that the said processes can rely on combinatory principles of word-frequency distributions. The Phenomenological Study of Genre Although word-frequency distributions are the main focus of the combinatory approach to genre theory, this does not mean that other phenomena are unimportant to genre identification (see the variables discussed in Holmes; De Nooy; Hanauer; Bortolussi and Dixon; Mealand; Zubarev, <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss1/2/>). It appears that, for instance, the Nigerian village n (...truncated)