Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes?

Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization

Author(s): Monika Fludernik
Source: Style , Vol. 34, No. 2, Concepts of Narrative (Summer 2000), pp. 274-292
Published by: Penn State University Press
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 Monika Fludernik
University of Freiburg

Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes?

Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization
In Coming to Terms (1990), Seymour Chatman initiated an enquiry into the
delimitation of the narrative text type as against the text types of argument and
description. This revolutionary step was a major landmark for literary scholars;
linguists, by contrast, had been battling with the same problems for two decades,
trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, the larger text types that are consti-
tutive of our understanding of narrative versus expository or exhortative discourse
(in oral or written formats), and, on the other hand, the surface textual sequences
of report, dialogue, argument, description, and so on. In narrative studies, too, there
arose some recognition that a narrative text does not exclusively consist in narrative
sentences but includes a large number of supposedly nonnarrative items (the speech
and thought representation of the characters, for instance) as well as metanarrative
features (e.g., the narrator’s evaluation, reader address) and some strictly speaking
nonnarrative elements, such as description, that are, however, constitutive of how
most narratives handle the setting. All of these supposedly nonnarrative elements
are basic ingredients of any narrative surface structure. From the classic definition
of narrative as a “mixed” genre (combining mimesis and diegesis) to Helmut Bon-
heim’s The Narrative Modes (1982), which analyses narrative texts as sequences
of report, speech, description, and comment, narratologists and literary scholars
have been keenly aware of the fact that novels or short stories or even historical
works are not uniformly “narrative.” Not every sentence in a narrative text, that
is, qualifies as “narrative” by the standards of narratological narrativity. It was
Chatman’s unique achievement to focus on this impurity of the narrative surface
structure with renewed critical attention and to tackle the problem in a manner
anticipated by text linguistics.
I would like to return to the problem of narrative’s variegated textual surface
structure, picking up where I left this issue of generic classification and text types
in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). In a very brief section of chapter 8 of
that book (section 8.4, esp. 356-58), I had proposed a revision and extension of
Chatman’s triad which I modelled on textlinguistic work found in Longacre’s The
Grammar of Discourse. I would now like to expand this proposal even further, link-
ing it more comprehensively with the structure of natural narratology. In particular,
I wish to discuss some of the theoretical implications of a text-type approach to the

274 Style: Volume 34, No. 1, Spring 2000

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 275

definition of narrative. I will start by introducing a few models from text linguistics,
especially the model of Virtanen and Wårvik with which I was not familiar when
writing Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology.

1. Text Types
Linguists have realized for some time that textual surface structures display
a wide spectrum of forms that vary with the respective type of discourse. Since
text linguistics, unlike literary scholarship, does not focus primarily on literary or
even on written texts, linguists have had to develop a great number of concepts
to account for variety in language use (register e.g.) or for the use of language in
specific situations (e.g. telephone conversations; natural narrative; doctor-patient
discourse; instruction manuals; cookbooks, etc.). The term “text type” in text
linguistics refers to a number of quite distinct phenomena on a variety of different
levels. In “Text-Type as a Linguistic Unit,” for instance, Esser defines text type as
“language variation according to use as opposed to variation according to user”
(142).1 He distinguishes between extensional definitions (text types as genres);
definitions based on external criteria of production; on structurally defined schemata
or superstructures (cf. van Dijk); and definitions deriving from “abstracted corpus
norms” established by means of statistical analysis (e.g., in the work of Biber).
None of these definitions concern the sentence or paragraph level, although the
term “text type” is frequently deployed with that reference, too. Whereas literary
scholars naturally focus on literary genres (synchronically and diachronically) and
subdivide the major genres — lyric, epic (fiction), and drama — into ever more
specific types (the novel, the detective novel; metaphysical poetry, the sonnet), text
linguists have been concerned with finding equivalents to the generic distinctions
between the lyric/epic/drama in their mostly non-literary corpora, and have been
subdividing their “big” text types into ever more specific “types of texts” (Textsorten).
A good example of such a typology is provided by Kinneavy in A Theory of
Discourse (1971). Kinneavy distinguishes between four “aims of discourse” (61),
modelled on Jakobson’s communicative functions (“Closing Statement”), i.e. the
expressive, referential, literary and persuasive text types (as we would say). The
category “literary aims of discourse” focusses on the signal (Jakobson’s “poetic
function”) and includes the joke, the movie, the TV show besides drama, ballads,
the lyric, the short story, and the like. Kinneavy’s expressive category splits into
(a) individual and (b) social types, including under (a) conversation, journals, and
prayers, and under (b) manifestos, contracts, myths, as well as religious credos. The
referential aim of discourse encompasses exploratory texts (dialogues, seminars);
scientific texts (“proving a point by arguing from accepted premises” or “by general-
izing from particulars”—it therefore best fits what might be called argumentation);
and informative texts (news articles, textbooks). The persuasive category includes
religious sermons, editorials, and political or legal oratory.
One can notice immediately how these aims of discourse open up more questions

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276 Monika Fludernik

than they answer. For one, written and oral modes are mentioned indiscriminately;
very specific situations (the seminar discussion) come to stand beside very general
and voluminous textual corpora (legal oratory, scientific discourse). Some prominent
text types are missing from the list, e.g., instruction manuals or guidebooks: are
these persuasive? Also, why is an editorial a persuasive text type and not, rather,
expository or expressive? In other words, Kinneavy’s courageous attempt at a
typology, which he establishes by aligning a number of textual categories with a
common purpose, despite its obvious merits fails to see that most texts of a given
“genre” are referential as well as persuasive or expressive. Real texts combine a
number of discourse aims with a variety of local realizations that may deviate from
these overall aims or straddle and integrate them with each other.
What is important about Kinneavy’s model, though, is the basic distinction
between a global text type on the one hand (his referential, expressive, persuasive,
and literary aims of discourse), and, on the other, its specific realization in an
empirical text belonging to a genre (something that linguists also call a text type
and that Egon Werlich calls a text form [Text Grammar 46]). Werlich’s typology
(Typologie der Texte; A Text Grammar of English) distinguishes between five text
types—description, narration, exposition, argumentation, and instruction. These
five text types are conceived as “an idealized norm of distinctive text structuring
which serves as a deep structural matrix of rules and elements for the encoder”
(Text Grammar 39). Werlich’s model distinguishes between three levels—the
ideal type (which is of a global prototypical nature and exists only as an abstract
matrix in language users’ minds); the text form, i.e., the specific text type (e.g., the
self-help manual); and the real manifest text as language—sentences, paragraphs,
chapters—that includes realizations of the abstract orders of text type and text form.
Werlich calls this third level the text idiom.
Werlich’s typology makes it easy to analyze texts on a sentence-by-sentence
level. It does raise some questions, however, regarding the ideal types. As with Chat-
man’s triad of descriptive, argumentative, and narrative, the category description falls
somewhat flat on the level of Werlich’s ideal text type since it has few realizations
on the text form (i.e., genre) level. Descriptions are a regular constituent of most
texts, but texts that are exclusively descriptive in character do not occur with great
frequency. In fact, one can argue that descriptive passages serve a crucial exposi-
tory function within narrative, in procedural (instructional) and in argumentative
texts since they define and introduce the phenomena with which the reader then
engages narratively, procedurally, or argumentatively. It is no coincidence that the
sentence Werlich uses to exemplify exposition (One part of the brain is the cortex
or rind) can easily be part of a description of the brain (Text Grammar 40). Indeed,
it is hard to see how description could work without conceptual clarification, or
the other way round.
Although these conceptual drawbacks persist in all models (including my
own), what is extremely important in Werlich’s proposals is the alignment of text

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 277

idiom with textual function. Werlich does not spell this out, but it is implicit in
his remarks. Whereas text types serve a communicative function (one deploys a
narrative text type in order to present phenomena in time), empirical linguistic
surface-structure sentences serve a function within this specific discourse. One
can thus begin to comprehend how a descriptive passage in a narrative text sets
the scene for imminent events, or how argumentation by the narrator evaluates the
action for the benefit of the narratee.
I now turn to the excellent paper by Tuija Virtanen and Brita Wårvik, “Obser-
vations sur les types de texte.” Their typology integrates the models of Kinneavy,
Werlich, Longacre (The Grammar of Discourse) and Jean-Michel Adam (“Quels
types de textes?”) and presents a very complex multi-level structure. Briefly, Vir-
tanen and Wårvik adopt from Longacre the emphasis on oral discourse types, and
from Adam the idea of including criteria from speech act theory.
Longacre had distinguished four text types (based on the combinations of
two binary oppositions: texts with or without temporal succession and texts with
or without an “agent orientation”). His four categories are narration, procedural
discourse, behavioral discourse, and expository discourse. Longacre thus eliminates
description as a global text type, and he introduces a category of the behavioral that
relates to speech act-oriented discourses (the prayer, political speeches). Thus, in
Longacre’s schema, whereas argument is not a text type but subtends expository
(scientific) and behavioral (persuasive) discourses, the concept of the procedural
can subsume description and exposition in the instructional function that underlies
this type. The major difference between Longacre and Werlich lies in Longacre’s
concentration on oral modes. Moreover, Longacre is more interested in the ideal
text type than in the sentence-by-sentence categorization of textual surface structure.
Adam expands Werlich’s typology to propose eight text types. He is not in-
terested in surface-structure phenomena but in global or deep-structure qualities
of text. Adam’s eight text types are:
- le type textuel narratif speech act: assertion
- le type textuel descriptif speech act: assertion
- le type textuel explicatif speech act: assertion
- le type textuel argumentatif speech act: convince
- le type textuel injonctif speech act: directive
- le type textuel prédictif speech act:prophesy
- le type textuel conversationnel speech acts:question; excuse; promise; genres:
interview; dialogue
- le type textuel rhétorique genres: poetry; songs; proverbs; graffiti
As we will see, this schema anticipates my argument for a conversational text type
and a reflective text type, Adam’s “rhetorical” text type. Adam is quite original
in aligning text types with speech acts, but as his schema demonstrates, such an
alignment does not yield a well-structured symmetry, for while three text types
correlate with assertive speech acts alone, other text types conjoin several different
speech acts. The positing of prediction as a separate text type also seems somewhat
de trop: after all, this text type cannot claim a large number of texts and genres

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278 Monika Fludernik

as its province. This criticism, however, is not meant to derogate the model; what
it attempts to point out is that a really convincing list of text types is extremely
difficult to come by and that such listing is fraught with a theoretical minefield
(speech acts versus discourse functions versus cognitive parameters as constitutive
categories of the typology).
Virtanen and Wårvik’s model (cf. figure 1) extends the three levels of Werlich’s
schema. Moreover, the authors proffer important theoretical discussions of the
(non-)adequation between text types and surface-structure phenomena. Virtanen and
Wårvik first of all propose the existence of an overall level of cognitive processes,
thereby extracting from Werlich’s text types those features that, from a cognitive
point of view, allow us to establish categorically what our discourses are about
from a conceptual point of view.2 Virtanen and Wårvik then propose a second level
relating to the functions of discourse (Kinneavy’s criterion) that enables encoders
then to pick a discourse type (“types de discours”), i.e., what Werlich and others
call a text type. Virtanen and Wårvik do not list any of these discourse types in a
comprehensive manner, but in their discussion refer to an argumentative discourse
type and to a narrative discourse type. In Virtanen’s more explicit “Issues of Text
Typology” (1992), the list includes narrative, description, instruction, exposition,
and argument.
The next level is taken up by text types (“types de textes”). These are subdivided
in accordance with multiple parameters (spoken-oral; formal-informal; fictional-
nonfictional; monologic-dialogic). These correspond to the genres in my model
or to Werlich’s text forms. On yet another level, Virtanen and Wårvik introduce
textual strategies that allow one to organize the text: “Sur un plan plus concret, on
choisit une stratégie textuelle pour organiser le texte” (107). [“On a more specific
level, one chooses a textual strategy with the purpose of organizing the text.”] These
levels are further extended top-down to include grammatical choice and, finally,
the actual text itself, the “texte actualisée.”
It is not quite clear from Virtanen and Wårvik’s essay whether their “straté-
gies textuelles” concern the choice of text idioms à la Werlich, i.e., sentences of
narration, description, and the like. In “Observations sur les types de texte,” the
example provided to note the fact that most texts are not “unitypal” suggests that
this is indeed the case:
Pour donner un example, nous pouvons partir du processus cognitif du jugement et notre
but sera alors de convaincre; donc nous choisissons le type de discours argumentatif.
Mais ce type n’est pas necessairement actualisé par l’argumentation; nous pouvons très
bien choisir, par exemple, la narration et y ajouter un peu de description et un morceau
d’évaluation. (107-08) [“To give an example, we can take the cognitive process of judgment
as a starting point, and our goal will then be to convince someone. Hence, we choose the
argumentative discourse type. However, this discourse type is not necessarily actualized
by means of argumentation; we could just as easily choose narration and add a little bit
of description and a bit of evaluative commentary.”]

But in Virtanen’s “Issues of Text Typology” these levels are reduced to two levels,

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 279

Figure 1.7
I. Les processus cognitifs
II. Les fonctions du discours
III. Les types de discours
IV. Les types de texts
langue registre monologique fictif paramètres stylist. etc.
écrite formel
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
langue registre dialogique non-fictif etc.
parlée informel

V. Les strategies textuelles

VI. La grammaire

          

VII. Les textes actualisés

discourse types and text types, which are constituted by discourse function and text
strategy, respectively. In this model, the generic types again disappear, and what is
referred to as text types are argumentative or descriptive sentences.
In “Issues of Text Typology,” Virtanen additionally discusses the combinability
between text types and discourse types for a number of texts. Thus, the narrative text
type, she argues, can be used in any discourse type, whereas argumentation mostly
serves to constitute the argumentative discourse type. The model also stipulates that
narrative is least able to occur without the actualization of the narrative text type,
whereas argument can take any shape on the text-type level (see figure 3 in “Issues
of Text Typology”). This schema therefore posits a symmetry between discourse
types and text types: there is for each discourse type one prototypical text type,
and the other way round, even if in the realization of ideal types in empirical texts
no neat correlation can be observed.
So far, the linguistic models have attempted to place narrative within a broad
spectrum of other text types. The most important insights from these contributions
can be summarized as follows: (1) One has to distinguish between global text types
that are defined as ideal text types, on the one hand, and realizations of these text
types on the linguistic surface structure, on the other. (2) On the linguistic surface
structure a combination of discourse types is found to interact. Their choice de-
pends on the discourse strategies (Virtanen and Wårvik) that speakers or writers

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280 Monika Fludernik

deploy. (3) Generic expectations have a great influence on the constitution of text
type and on the choice of discourse strategies. (4) Form (i.e., type of text type or
discourse type) and function (the specific discourse purpose to be achieved) must
be distinguished. A one-to-one relationship between form and function can not
necessarily be assumed to exist.
Bearing these insights in mind, let me now turn to my own proposals as dis-
cussed in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology.

2. Macrogeneric Text Type, Genre and Discourse Mode:

A Narratological Model
In the wake of Helmut Bonheim, both Seymour Chatman, in Coming to Terms,
and Jon Adams, in Narrative Explanation, have distinguished three narratologically
relevant text or discourse types: narrative, description, and argument (Chatman);
narrative, description, and exposition (Adams). These three categories quite obvi-
ously reflect on elements observable in narrative discourse: the narrator’s diegetic
narration (exclusive of the representation of characters’ discourse) clearly conjoins
sentences that refer to plot, sentences that descriptively set the scene, and sentences
that are argumentative (evaluative, reader-addressed, presenting an argument about
the fictional world or a commentary by the narrator on it). Delimiting these three
types of sentences may be problematic, however. Thus, exposition may be evaluative
and descriptive and even refer to events. Even more problematic is the exclusion of
dialogue (and thought representation) from the list since dialogue often takes up a
large proportion of the surface text, and these models pretend to work on the basis
of a bottom-up methodology. Perhaps most suspect of all is that both models posit
the existence of description as a general text type, since description is very rarely
a unitype text type, i.e., there are extremely few purely descriptive texts around.
In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, I therefore proposed (a) to distinguish
between three levels of text types and (b) to start out from a functional approach
that takes the oral language as its primary model. My presupposition is that the
category of genre also pertains in nonliterary discourse (cf. Weinrich 1972).3 My
model has many similarities to Virtanen and Wårvik’s schema. The three levels I
proposed were:
(1) The level of the macro-genre, Virtanen and Wårvik’s discourse type. This level is
constituted by the functions of communication.
(2) The level of genre. Traditional genre expectations are operative here.
(3) The level of discourse mode on the surface level of texts. On this level, the function,
for instance of an argumentative or descriptive passage, within the schema of the specific
genre is at issue.

If one starts out from the oral language, a number of additional macro-genres sug-
gest themselves for consideration. Extending what I said in Towards a ‘Natural’
Narratology, one could posit the macro-genre conversation besides narrative, argu-
ment, and instruction, and one might even want to add a meta-linguistic category

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 281

(the reflective text type). Before arguing for this particular set of macro-genres,
let me first present the rest of the schema. On the specific level of empirical texts,
these macro-genres are realized as textual genres (written language) and text types
(Textsorten; oral language). The diversity of these genres arises from the multiplic-
ity of their contexts of use; the categorization into genres within a macro-genre is
effected on the basis of the discourse functions constitutive of the macro-genres.
On the third level, which I see as entirely distinct from the two generic levels,
the surface structure of texts and the specific functional correlates within specific
genres or text types determine the discourse modes that I have enumerated in figure
2. For instance, description within narrative serves an orientational function (expo-
sition in the sense of providing background information for the better reliefing of
narrative foreground), but within scientific prose, for example, description may be
part of an exposition or part of a directive sequence in a guide book. Likewise, what
is usually considered to be narrative report (the presentation of event sequences)
corresponds to the argumentative backbone in historiography and to the procedural
core of instructional discourse. Some discourse modes, like the oral mode of phatic
expressions (mmh, right, good, whatever), do not have equivalents in other text
types because they are specific to conversational exchange. The list of discourse
modes is therefore open, and individual discourse modes perform entirely different
functions in their various generic contexts.
Before going into the model in more detail, let me start by emphasizing that
the proposal I am presenting for consideration is not meant to be the last word on
this issue of text types and related concepts. As a literary scholar with a great deal
of interest in linguistics, what I am doing here is offering a few suggestions from
a narratological perspective. It is up to text linguistics to add further categories, or
to reconceptualize the schema in any way that linguists find corresponds with their
material. The model in figure 2 is not meant to be a solution to what are clearly
quite intractable problems for literary scholars and linguists alike, but tentatively
to redress what I have seen as some shortcomings in previous models, particularly
from a narratological perspective.
After these caveats, allow me to proceed into more detail. I have proposed
two new macro-genres, conversation and reflective discourse, a move that requires
some justification. Much of the oral language cannot be aligned exclusively with
an argumentative—persuasive or didactic or instructional—purpose, nor does it
serve to express the speaker’s experience (narrative). Much conversational exchange
merely serves the purpose of what Jakobson called the phatic function—staying
in touch, establishing and preserving contact, furthering social interaction. Most
conversation is in fact seemingly purposeless, does not have predetermined aims
or clear procedural routines, or at best moves from one short-term goal to the other.
Indeed, much of conversational narrative can be identified as an exchange of news,
have-you-heard-the-latest? type of discourse, rather than an instance of full-blown
narrative experientiality—and to this extent much conversational narrative has a

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282 Monika Fludernik

Figure 2.
Macrogenres narrative argumentative instructive conversational reflective

genres /
text types novel scientific texts guidebooks letters philosophy
drama historiography how-to-books contracts art criticism
film ... ... ...
... newspapers sermons discussion ...
conversational ... ... ... jokes
narrative oratory advice conversational poetry
... exchange
myth

discourse
modes
report expositional directives address metalinguistic
sequence sentences statements
argumentative exhortations dialogue
passages gnomic
(commentary) language
orientational phatic word play
passages sequences
(=description)

low degree of narrativity in terms of natural narratology. Conversation has been

proposed as a macrogenre to account for the prominence of interactivity in the
oral language. In written texts, there are not many such interactive genres. On the
level of discourse mode, the textual manifestation that most closely corresponds to
interaction is dialogue, a prominent textual surface element in narrative. The reader
will have noted that I have placed drama among the narrative genres. I did this to
mark the experiential, narrative structure of dramatic literature. In literary drama
the interaction is between the characters on stage; their interaction belongs with the
conversational macro-genre. The play as a whole, however, is a narrative, and that
narrative is represented by an enactment of it. This interaction between characters
should not be identified with interaction between communicative partners on the
discourse level (in their dialogue); indeed, drama is one of the literary forms that
has least direct persuasive force since its mode of rhetoric is for the most part an
indirect one (to be decoded by the audience). The conversational form of drama
therefore serves a representational (mimetic) and medium-related function.
My second new category requiring some explanation is the metalinguistic
genre, which I have called “reflective.” In a sense such a category is the descendent
of Jakobson’s poetic and metalinguistic functions or of Kinneavy’s literary aim of
discourse. Moreover, in its reflective garb, this macro-genre has much to recom-
mend itself as a quite general discourse function. All discourse, written and oral,
narrative or expository, is usually framed by two additional discourse levels: an
orientational, background level as well as a commentatory level. In other words,

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 283

whatever type of text we are writing, we always add comments to it or fill in ad-
ditional information. Thus, in a historical text, comments by the historiographer on
the purposes of his endeavor or evaluative asides occur as frequently as explanatory
comments on the antecedents of certain developments. Likewise, in a cookbook
some general comments may be found, for instance advice on how important it is
to have an additional ten eggs on hand, and specific instructions may be expanded
by explanatory asides on how precisely to fold in the eggs or whip the cream. Fur-
thermore, discourses in a variety of ways reflect on themselves or step away from
communicative purposes to indulge in abstraction, speculation, and play. Such uses
of discourse need not be literary as such, but they can be aligned with a number of
historical genres or text types, some of which — such as jokes — are frequently
discussed as potentially literary texts. My main intention in adding the category
of reflective discourse, however, was to find a slot for the genre of poetry (in the
sense of lyric poetry). A poem represents perhaps the most perfect example of a
literary text without a clearly determinable communicative purpose. Even where
the mood of the speaker is at issue, a poem seems to consist in an expression of
feeling for its own sake. It is for this reason that the reflective category has been
added to the list of macro-genres. I will come back to the genre of poetry and its
narratological relevance in section 3 below.
The second most crucial reorientation apparent from figure 2 concerns the
introduction and naming of a level of discourse modes. As I already noted, these
do not directly correlate with genres or macro-genres but, instead, constitute text-
linguistic units within genre-specific schemata. Adam and Esser already gestured
in this direction when they saw the text type narrative as structured by a split into
story and evaluation, with story subdividing into orientation and story, and story into
narrative episodes that consist of recursive event-resolution segments. In the wake of
my proposals in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, one can specify the structure of
narrative even further. Thus, for conversational storytelling, it can be demonstrated
that the discourse mode report occurs in narrative clauses inside episodes as well
as (less consistently) in some flashback (delayed orientation) sections; description
occurs prototypically in orientation and delayed orientation sections; argumentation
in narratorial comment and in the final evaluation (the coda); and the abstract could
be argued to belong to the expositional discourse mode, with interactional discourse
(reader address) also confined to the framing narratorial segments (abstract, coda,
narratorial comment). Dialogue, a central feature of narrative episodes, is another
prominent discourse mode.
In the case of other genres, the structural patterns and functionally relevant
discourse modes vary greatly. Rhetorical genres, for instance, could be analyzed in
terms of classical rhetoric categories such as dispositio (cf. Adam’s treatment of a
commercial for a dishwashing liquid—42); conversation might require a quite dif-
ferent analysis that would have to recur to structural patterns such as turns, feedback,
or topic-changing and attention-preserving mechanisms; and argumentative prose

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284 Monika Fludernik

could be structured in terms of logical procedural progression with mechanisms

for completion, thematic expansion and sequence formation (cf. Werlich, Text
Grammar 24-38). Mulcahy and Samuels quote a typology by B.J.F. Meyer (1985)
in which different types of expository writing are outlined:
Meyer classifies text according to five types: collection (list-like), causation, response
(problem-solution), comparison, and description. Each of these classifications prescribes
a specific type of logical relationship. For instance, causation specifies a causal relation-
ship in which one idea is the cause and the related idea is the consequence. [...] Meyer &
Freedle (1979) noted the effects of four types of top-level discourse structures on recall.
They noted that subjects who listened to adversative (contrastive) and covariance (cause-
effect) structures remembered more than subjects who listened to attribution (list-like) and
response (problem-solution) structures. (251)

Such global structures for expository writing also allow for functional subdivision
in parallel to that of episode elements in narrative. The point I want to make here
concerns the variability of discourse modes (there are a great number of discourse
modes, quite a few of which are peculiar to only one or two genres) and their func-
tional multivalence: Report or description, for instance, have an entirely different
status and function in narratives than they do in expository writing. Again, as a
literary scholar I am here turning the job over to linguists to do more with such a
model. My concern, basically, is a narratologically fruitful approach to the issue
of text types, i.e., macro-genres.
What is new about the model I have proposed relates primarily to the func-
tional alignment of discourse modes within genres. As in Virtanen and Wårvik
and Kinneavy, the macro-genres are ideal types, and so are genres and text types.
My main concern in proposing the model has been to explicate the macro-genre
narrative as an ideal type and to relate its multiform textual surface structure on
the sentence level (i.e., the discourse modes) to the abstract text-type category
(here split into macro-genre and specific generic moulds). I therefore now return
to my narratological origins in spelling out what this model might do in practical
narratological terms.

3. Consequences for Natural Narratology

In this final section of the paper I want to outline a few consequences of my
conception of macro-genres for narratology.
The provisional model of macro-genres presented here is, first of all, one that
takes naturally occurring discourses as its prototypes. Therefore, all macro-genres
correspond to discourse functions observed in oral language. Nevertheless, some
discourse functions have—in terms of actualized genres—developed more strongly
in the written language, whereas others (the conversational macro-genre) continue
to be constitutive of orality even though they are adaptable to written discourse. As
a consequence of the historical move from orality to literacy, the surface structure
of texts begins to evolve in different ways. As far as the narrative macro-genre is
concerned, for instance, the discourse modes observable in natural narrative in-
creasingly lose their original functions within the structure of the (oral) narrative

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 285

episode and entail changes in narrative structure that require concomitant func-
tional realignments and modifications. Thus, the originary episodic pattern of oral
narrative develops towards a report-plus-scene structure constitutive of the novel
as a genre. A similar type of development can be observed for such macro-genres
as argumentative or instructional discourse because each written text type tends
to evolve a tradition of its own in which quite specific structures and techniques
establish themselves as core elements of the genre. One need only think of the
topic sentence in essay writing to realize that such features are both structurally
central and historically relative—topic sentences are not the norm in French or
German argumentative prose, and these days they seem to have gone out of fashion
to some extent even in English language composition. My model is therefore open
to a diachronic perspective.
A second important consequence of integrating narrative with other macro-
genres is the reposing of the definitional question of narrative. If narrative is
definable in relation to a spectrum of five or seven text types (macro-genres), then
one is tempted to set narrative in contrast to instruction or reflection in a quite es-
sentialist manner, or, relationally, to posit systematically complementary discourse
functions for each macro-genre. Here it is extremely important to remember that
macro-genres are abstractions and do not exist; in fact, they “exist” much less
concretely than do genres manifested in a huge number of actual texts and do seem
to influence composition by the weight of tradition (the bulk of former such texts)
and the hypostacized “genre” concept emanating from that tradition or practice.
Moreover, by contrasting macro-generic features, one is actually contrasting ideal-
ized concretizations of discourse functions.
It might, in fact, even be possible to eliminate the level of macro-genres by a
swift slash with Occam’s razor. After all, the purpose that macro-genres serve is
that of ordering genres into manageable groups or categories. Despite some basic
distinctions that apparently form part of speakers’ linguistic competence (Faigley
and Meyer), the traditional categorizations repose on very arbitrary groupings, as
the comparison of different models of text types (including my own) has no doubt
illustrated. It is because we want to find a common denominator among texts that
we regard as narrative, expository, or instructional that we begin to search for a
discourse function that might unite the very disparate genres within these categories.
Thus, to posit that readers first choose a discourse function before they decide on a
text type or genre seems to me to invert the order in which, cognitively speaking,
textualizing processes actually evolve. Speakers, I would argue, start out from a
universe of discourses, and within that universe pick out the genre that seems most
appropriate to their current concerns. I would presume that they also tactically choose
one genre over another because of the textual strategies available in a specific genre.
Having deconstructed the idea of the macro-genre and revealed it to be a mere
red herring in text linguistics and literary theory, where do we go from here?
Whereas text linguistics can perhaps afford to shrug its shoulders and simply

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286 Monika Fludernik

turn to the analysis of individual genres (cookbooks, instruction manuals, TV com-

mercials), postponing theorization to the stage when it can safely be performed in
an inductive manner, literary scholars find themselves in the unenviable position of
having to search through their own rubbish bin: even if one agrees that “narrative”
as a macro-genre may be an illusionary concept (and, even more so, an elusive one),
the fact remains that there exist huge numbers of novels, poems, plays, histories,
and biographies, and that one has to make categorical distinctions among them.
Since literary critics do not regularly concern themselves with scientific prose or
instruction manuals, they focus on a very narrow set of texts, so-called literary
texts, that is. As a consequence, distinctions among them loom large, and the
constraint to set apart what readers intuit to be different groups of genres results
in theoretical disciplines such as poetics, genre theory, narratology, drama theory,
or the theory of poetry. Why is it so much more important to literary scholars that
they can “prove” a text to be narrative rather than, say, lyric? Perhaps this is the
case because there are so many poems or prose texts that defy categorization, that
force readers to decide whether to read them as narrative rather than as poetry?
Because we read literary texts quite differently when we read them as narratives
rather than as poems or essays. When we encounter a commercial, we read this as
a commercial, and the problem of whether a commercial is an instructional text
(go and buy this) or an argumentative text (this article is good because ...) arises
for the text linguist but presumably not for the consumer. By contrast, reading a
passage from Gertrude Stein’s later work as narrative will yield a quite different
reading experience from its being read as poetry.
Which brings us back to the much-vexed question of the distinctions between
the narrative and poetic genres, an issue recently taken up again by Werner Wolf in
“Aesthetic Illusion in Poetry.” (The distinctness of drama in any discussion makes
it a moot point in this context; even if narratologists lay claim to drama as a nar-
rative genre, drama will always be clearly defined on account of its dialogue form
and performative and visual nature.)
Wolf does not create an inviolable barrier between poetry and what he calls
aesthetic illusion (which correlates with mimesis as prototypically constitutive of
narrative, drama, painting, film). According to Wolf, Keats’s “Grecian Urn” can be
read as an illusionistic text in which the “perception of the urn,” rather than being
a merely static description, turns into “a dynamic imaginative activity” (282-83)
and therefore fulfills a requirement of experientiality (Fludernik) that for Wolf
constitutes aesthetic illusionism.4 In other words, by positing the viewer as engaged
in a specific act of perception, one specific in space and time, Wolf is able to move
from the displacement, abstraction, and generality of poetry to aesthetic illusion.
But Wolf does not align this poem with narrativity.5 Wolf’s proposals, which are a
very interesting reworking of his earlier positions in Ästhetische Illusion (1993),
also introducing the possible-worlds aspects of aesthetic illusion, are located on the
level of interliterary analysis. They split the literary field into illusionistic, antiil-

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 287

lusionistic, and nonillusionistic texts. For Wolf, the genre narrative is distinctly
illusionistic, even if combinable with some antiillusionistic elements. Poetry, by
contrast, is prototypically conceived of as nonillusionistic but may assume illu-
sionistic features if read narratively (the narrative poem) or experientially, as in
the case of Keats’s “Grecian Urn.”
Problems arise, however, if one attempts to integrate Wolf’s model with text-
type theory. The main one is that because Wolf very laudatorily attempts to define
aesthetic illusion as well as poetry on the basis of a cluster of features partly in binary
opposition, he deploys features that do not easily compare with instructional prose
or with scientific texts. Thus, Wolf’s list of the characteristics of poetry (“Aesthetic
Illusion” 261-63) combines (1) brevity and reduction (versus the novel?—but this
is a feature also typically adduced for the short story); (2) the presence of a lyric
persona (fiction, too, usually is supposed to have a speaker); (3) the “emphasis
on the utterance as the product of consciousness rather than on the content of the
utterance (as in narrative fiction)”; (4) dereferentialization (i.e., lack of specificity,
a feature that is prominent in narrative); (5) foregrounded self-referentiality (i.e.,
Jakobson’s poetic function; this is a feature shared with anti-illusionistic narrative);
(6) musicality (i.e., the rhythmic and acoustic features of poetry); and (7) artificial-
ity (i.e., the foregrounding of formal features of poetry such as versification). It
is interesting to note that a narrative that is particularly anti-illusionistic, having
qualities (3), (4), (5) and (7), would—according to this model—appear to be more
“lyrical” than prototypically narrative.
Wolf’s essay is a particularly noteworthy attempt to set up a definition of poetry
in contradistinction to narrative, thereby redefining narrative in opposition to poetry.
This move constitutes a departure from the traditional constitutive opposition of
narrative versus drama that is the basis of F.K. Stanzel’s narrative theory and implicit
in Genette’s formulations. Wolf is astute in not setting up clear binary oppositions
between narrative and poetry on each and every count. What immediately emerges
as a crucial consequence of this model, however, is its lack of common ground
with such text-type oppositions as Chatman’s narrative, argument, and description,
and expository and instructional writing in some other typologies. Nor does Wolf
address the question of fictionality, although his alignment of aesthetic illusion qua
experientiality with possible world structure suggests that lyric poetry is only partly
a fictional genre. But the question of fictionality as a qualifying category does not
really arise because his emphasis is exclusively on the literary realm. In Wolf’s very
interesting model, the literary realm is entirely cut off from that of other nonliterary
texts. The question whether, or to what extent, his categories might apply to, or
compare with, historical writing, instructional prose or expository discourse simply
does not figure. The very strength of the model lies precisely in its concentration
on the literary field, and within that it supplies excellent distinctions.
Natural narratology, by contrast, has set itself the task to encompass the entire
range of literary and nonliterary texts, and—like Chatman—to integrate narrative

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288 Monika Fludernik

with other macro-genres. I have now modified my earlier proposals to add the
reflective macro-genre to the more traditional list, and it might therefore be of use
to show more precisely how natural narratology combines the linguistic framework
of text types with the requirements of narratological and poetic analysis. Compar-
ing narrative with other macro-genres (including the reflective) puts the emphasis
on the discourse function(s) of narrative that—in natural narrative—consist in the
discursive mastering of experience. Experientiality was defined as the conjunction
of tellability and point (Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology 29), that is, in relation
to the narrative dynamics of embodied experience and human consciousness. Re-
flectivity, by contrast, although it is also an expressive discourse function, seems
to operate like a kind of equivalent of “art for art’s sake” in the realm of discourse.
As Wolf points out, whereas the self-referential strain of poetry can be treated as
an indicator of dereferentialization, narrative (and all other major macro-genres)
are inherently referential (whether they refer to a possible world or the addressee’s
and speaker’s shared world).
What is the status of aesthetic illusion and of consciousness in these mod-
els? Aesthetic illusion, in the framework of natural narratology, corresponds to a
naturalization of a text as mimetic. For those unfamiliar with Towards a ‘Natural’
Narratology, naturalization is the process by means of which readers decode a text
as narrative. One of the major consequences of the model of natural narratology
has been the integration of twentieth-century texts that—according to traditional
narratological accounts—were only marginally narrative into the realm of narrativity.
Thus, such plotless Modernist texts as Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall”
display a high degree of experientiality and are therefore prototypically narrative.
Not only is the speaker in “The Mark on the Wall” represented as an experiencer, a
consciousness, but the text is also an example of extensive reflectivity and therefore
even more closely bound up with human consciousness. Such texts are narrativized
accordingly as instances of represented consciousness. Other, more metafictional
exercises, such as the texts of B.S. Johnson, likewise can be narrativized as exer-
cises in narratorial reflectivity: the speaker’s reflective and critical consciousness
constitutes the experientiality of the text.
The question here is to what extent mimesis interrelates with consciousness.
Mimesis certainly comprises the representation of consciousness as part of our
everyday world experience. It does not necessarily entail considerations of temporal
and spatial anchoring or of temporality, both of which are central to the notion of
narrative experientiality and therefore constitutive of narrativity. Wolf’s aesthetic
illusion, which I take to be a cognitively updated version of mimesis (and, possibly,
realism), correlates with the illusion of life-likeness. Since narrative experiential-
ity is part of the general human experience, it can become a signified of aesthetic
illusionism. Narrativity, which is established by the projection of experiential con-
sciousness (as agent, patient, viewer, or simply as reflective mind) within specific
spatio-temporal parameters, therefore participates in illusionism, but illusionism

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Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? 289

is not necessarily constitutive of narrative. Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” can be

discussed as an instance of aesthetic illusion, of ekphrasis. It is not an instance of
narrative, however, since the speaker remains too abstract to figure as a narrative
persona. On the other hand, a poem like Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to
his Love” (“Come live with me, and be my love”) is arguably more narrative since
it invokes an entire situation of wooing that might be specific in place and time.
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is perhaps even more easily recuperable as narrative,
either as a marginally narrative account of Kubla Khan’s specific experience of
omens (“And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying
war!”), or—much more convincingly—as the account of the speaker’s dream vi-
sion, i.e., his consciousness. Narrative poems, such as Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the
Death of a Favourite Cat” (“‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side [. . .] The pensive Selima
reclined [. . .] She tumbled headlong in.”) or Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” need
no additional effort at narrativization; their narrativity is easily assured on the basis
of a proper plot and correlative experientiality.
Poetry can, therefore, both in Wolf’s model and in my own, share illusionistic
and even narrative features. But prototypical poetry tends to be both nonnarrative
and nonillusionistic. Within a text-type approach to literary genres, however, aes-
thetic illusion (whether in conjunction with, or as a replacement of, narrativity)
has little usefulness as a defining feature of narrative in contrast to instruction or
conversation or other macro-genres. In fictional narratives, precisely on account
of their fictionality, aesthetic illusionism can lay claim to an important status in
the critical vocabulary. When one extends the study of narrative to the realm of all
discourses, different distinctions become operative.
But, as in the discussion about macro-genres, this analysis is actually de trop.
What readers really do when they read a text largely depends to start with on the
observable generic alignment of that text. In so far as a text is read as narrative
(and poems will less easily give rise to such a reading), it is read as a specific
instantiation of experientiality in time, and this reading will imply a good mea-
sure of mimetic illusionism. Narrativization, moreover, manages to explain how
experimental texts that are plainly antiillusionistic nevertheless allow themselves
to be read in accordance with narrative frames. Poems, which are prototypically
conceived of as nonillusionistic, can also be read as narratives, but only to the
extent that they engage with specificity6 and temporality, and with the discursive
mastery of experience.
At this point we have, however, left behind our linguistic model of text types
based on inductive abstractions and have moved instead to a reception-oriented
model of the dynamic decoding process, a model that opens itself to diachronic
analysis. Within the confines of the mimetic language game, the purely literary
conceptions of Wolf’s model pertain; when expanded to include the oral language,
nonfiction and a diachronic perspective, narrativity—if we are to create abstract
entities at all—needs to be conceived in a broader and more durable shape. It must

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290 Monika Fludernik

operate as a text type constituent as well as a category of literary production, and

it must be flexible enough to allow for readers’ or speakers’ appropriations, modi-
fications, or revaluations. It is from this broad, inclusive perspective that natural
narratology can fruitfully engage with text linguistics and become a partner in
a lively crossdisciplinary exchange. After all, genre is not a concept confined to
literary criticism, but a term relating to categorial analysis. And categories of the
mind are shared among us all.

Notes
1
See de Beaugrande (197-99) for a comprehensive user-oriented typology.
According to Faigley and Meyer’s “Rhetorical Theory,” readers are able to
2

recognize text types as part of their linguistic competence.

“Wenn die Literaturwissenschaft, außer den Texten der schönen Literatur
3

oder Dichtung, auch nichtpoetische (‘expositorische’) Texte untersuchen will, ist

der historisch-literarische Gattungsbegriff ohne besondere Schwierigkeiten auf
diesen Untersuchungsbereich übertragbar” (Weinreich 161). ‘If literary criticism
analyzes non-poetic (‘expository’) texts besides belles lettres or poetry, it can do
so without any difficulty and can employ the concept of genre (a term from literary
history) also in reference to such non-poetic texts.”
4
Wolf’s original definition of aesthetic illusion in Ästhetische Illusion und
Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst did not yet repose on a criterion of
experientiality. I introduced the term in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology to define
narrativity and to link narrative with a consciousness factor whether of mediation
or participation.
Wolf continues to link narrativity with plot density (“Ereignishaftigkeit —
5

personal communication).
6
Compare also Pfister 12-14.
This is figure 6 (“Les niveaux d’analyse typologique des textes”) in Virtanen
7

and Wårvik 106.

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