Genre and Character Constellations

This chapter argues that notions of genre in literary reading in classical, structuralist, and cognitive approaches have too narrowly focused on readers’ contact with other literary texts for the formation of reading expectations. It briefly discusses the development of genre theory in literary scholarship from a classificatory endeavour to an acknowledgement of the cognitive realities that influence genre-oriented reading. It introduces the concept of relational reading expectations, arguing that the exposure of readers also to other media products that contain narratives of interpersonal constellations are instrumental in forming relationship-oriented expectations in literary reading. Furthermore, the notion of the generic chunk suggest that relational expectations are often tentative, fragmentary, and temporary in nature. Individual social experience and social knowledge are acknowledged as generating reading expectations beside knowledge of reoccurring constellations in particular types of texts, and the dynamics of reading expectations are shown to involve readers’ engagement with MCSs in the three dimensions of text-reader interaction explicated in chapter 2 , and to combine the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic aspects of how characters can be connected in narrative.