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The Space of Genre in the New Green Novel

Since the late 1980s, a new variety of English-language political fiction has developed – the green novel. Organized around tropes of crisis and decay, the new green novel gives generic form to the pervasive sense of urgency attached to environmental problems in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is easily distinguished from neighboring forms, such as the fiction of urban crisis, by its treatment of Romantic and dystopian elements. These predecessor styles appear in transposed form in the new green novel, and the genre coheres around a stable set of motifs that update central ideas from the predecessors. In its most common version, the green novel expresses a critique of liberal individualist approaches to planetary problems, but in a few key works this critical tendency deepens into a more collective and affirmative mapping project. To identify the generic qualities of the new green novel we need to recognize the explanatory force of genre itself. This concept has, after all, been under attack since the heyday of poststructuralism when Jacques Derrida (1980) and Maurice Blanchot (1986) famously assaulted it. There is no pure genre and therefore no faithful subject of the law of genre, Derrida and Blanchot argued. To this wellknown critique of genre as a principle, Tzvetan Todorov offers a useful rejoinder. Countering Blanchot in particular, in “The origin of genres,” Todorov (1976) understands genre as the codification of human discourse – that is, as a more or less complex sequence of processes performed on a discursive germ or kernel. Todorov enumerates these operations and risks a claim about the initial speech act that serves as the kernel for particular genres. For Todorov’s speech-act theory of genre, purity does not define genres, so generic hybridity does not disintegrate a genre. Todorov readily recognizes that “a new genre is always the transformation of one or several old genres,” in addition to having variable social functions (1976: 161). From this perspective, the key to successful genre analysis lies in a combination of analytic rigor and speculative boldness. In Todorov’s work, these result in a number of productive schemata; his analysis abounds with concrete and precise accounts of a range of operations – such as the assertion that a new genre will either invert, displace, or extend its predecessor as it elaborates on its founding speech act. In other words, Todorov’s approach to genre invites consideration of the mutability of literary forms alongside speculation about their ideological effects for social subjects. The latter concern is crucial. “A society chooses and codifies the acts that correspond most closely to its ideology,” Todorov writes; “this is why the existence of certain genres in a society and their absence in another reveal a central ideology, and enable us to establish it with considerable certainty” (1976: 164). By exposing the ideological commitments of a particular society, genre analysis provides insight into aesthetic and social history simultaneously.