THE GENRE of the BOOK of JUBILEES* John J. Collins Genre
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THE GENRE OF THE BOOK OF JUBILEES* John J. Collins Genre Literary competence, writes John Barton, can be defined principally as the ability to recognize genre.1 He defines genre as “any recognizable and distinguishable type of writing or speech—whether ‘literary’ in the complimentary sense of that word or merely utilitarian, like a business letter—which operates within certain conventions that are in principle (not necessarily in practice) statable.”2 The important thing is to know the kind of writing that is involved, and the conventions that apply. As Carol Newsom puts it, “genres serve as proffered contracts between writers and readers, providing common expectations for what the text in question is intended to do and what means it is likely to use.”3 The expectations of readers are guided by association with other works that are perceived to be similar. Without some such associations, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand a work at all. In the words of Jonathan Culler, “A work can only be read in connection with or against other texts, which provide a grid through which it is read and structured by establishing expectations which enable one to pick out salient features and give them a structure.”4 Recognition of genre is an art rather than a science, and there has been considerable debate about the appropriate criteria.5 The phase of * It is a pleasure to dedicate this essay to Jim VanderKam, who has done more than any scholar since R. H. Charles to advance the study of the book of Jubilees. 1 John Barton, Reading the Old Testament. Method in Biblical Study (rev. ed.; Louis- ville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 16. Barton’s view of genre follows that of E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 68–126. 2 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 16. 3 Carol A. Newsom, “Rhetorical Criticism and the Reading of the Qumran Scrolls,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Timothy H. Lim and John J. Col- lins; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 691. 4 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 139. 5 See David Duff, Modern Genre Theory (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000). For an excellent overview, with an eye to biblical studies, see Carol A. Newsom, “Spying Out the Land: A Report from Genology,” in Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies 738 john j. collins literary criticism known as “New Criticism” tended to favor formal criteria.6 According to the influential introduction to literary theory of René Wellek and Austin Warren: “Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose—more crudely, subject and audience).”7 More recent theorists have tended to deprecate classification. Alistair Fowler famously quipped that genres are more like pigeons than pigeonholes.8 It is certainly true that generic classification has often been too rigid. Genres are not ontological entities. They are largely pragmatic con- figurations based on scholars’ perceptions of affinities, and shaped in part by the perspective and interest of the analyst. There is no reason why a text might not have affinities with more than one genre, and genres inevitably change and are modified over time. Moreover, mere classification is only a prelude to many of the more interesting ques- tions we can ask about texts, including that of function.9 Yet it remains true that without classification there is no generic analysis at all.10 Even if a text is judged to fall in the interstices between genres, and not to conform to any recognized category, this judgment is only possible on the basis of a classification of recognized genres. That said, genres may be classified in various ways. The classic “new critical” approach to genres was based on the formal features of texts, and this mode of classification could be extended to take account of (ed. Roland Boer; Semeia Studies 63; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 19–30 (originally published in Seeking Out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday [ed. Ronald L. Troxel et al.; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005], 437–50). 6 R. S. Crane, Critical and Historical Principles of Literary Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 38. See the comments of Amy J. Devitt, Writing Genres (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 6. 7 Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 231. 8 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 36. 9 Much recent genre theory seems to be concerned with the way genres work rather than with the more basic problem of identifying a genre in the first case. See, e.g., Devitt (Writing Genres) or, in the context of biblical studies, Christine Mitchell, “Power, Eros, and Biblical Genres,” in Bakhtin and Genre Theory, 31–43. 10 Devitt (Writing Genres, 7) says that “defining genre as a kind of text becomes circular, since what we call a kind of text depends on what we think a genre is,” but quickly adds: “That conundrum does not mean that genres do not involve classifica- tion nor that devising a classification scheme is necessarily a waste of time.” Indeed, if genre is not “a kind of text,” one is left to wonder what the word means at all. .