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Redistributing the Sensible: Genre Theory after Rancière

ABSTRACT At once omnipresent and undertheorized, genre is what nobody really believes in but everyone tacitly relies upon, whether they are writing literary criticism or consulting a pull-down menu on Netflix. Taking up the portable slogan of Jacques Rancière, that politics is itself a “distribution of the sensible” (partage du sensible), and placing it in dialogue with Rosalie Colie’s assertion that genre systems offer a “fix” upon the world, this article argues for an understanding of genre as an affective filter that enacts a politics of perception, opening and closing down avenues of recognition, feeling and allegiance, encouraging identification in some directions while discouraging it in others. Sir Philip Sidney’s discussion of the “mongrel” form of tragicomedy in the Defense of Poesy is juxtaposed with the varieties of actual dramatic practice of early modern playwrights (including Lyly, Preston, and Shakespeare, who wrote across generic boundaries) in order to assess what a Rancière-inflected genre theory might look like.