Genre as Network & Hybridity’s State of Matter : An Utterance About Literary Terminology

The word hybrid and its variants have been used in literary studies to mean something different in terms of theory, poetics, theme, literary device. Writers, scholars, and publishers— all the audience for this essay—in their varied agendas, perhaps fueled by the expansiveness of the media available on the internet, too often perpetuate a definitional confusion around this word. A work that utilizes hybridity or is of a hybrid genre cannot be placed into one singular generic category with all other works that do so—works must be qualified and more specifically categorized when possible. If all hybrid texts are allowed to simply be called such, the future of literary scholarship hangs on a retroactive thread, wherein too much of literary history would have to be re-imagined and redefined. Suddenly, Moby Dick is no longer a novel, but a hybrid text. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? A hybrid text. Everything Gertrude Stein ever penned—hybrid. Proponents of hybrid writing often acknowledge this fact, such as in the introduction to Family Resemblance: An Anthology of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres penned by Susanne Paola Antonetta, when she says, “Where we find literature, we find hybridity.” However, not all do the work to solve the problem they raise in this admission with the breadth that the word hybrid would then cover.

Many works of the past combine concepts that are key to our understanding of genres in the early twenty-first century, and different genres contemporary to past works have gone in and out of vogue. On the other hand, looking back at works and seeing them as works that utilize hybridity as a tool can help scholars in their discussions of previously undefinable, generically multi-dimensional works that might be abandoned due to scholars’ and bookstores’ inabilities to place them into teachable, shelvable, or otherwise relevant categories^[1]. Classification of genre situates works historically and clues in readers on how to read or approach a text. A text that purposely obfuscates this relationship does not necessarily combine more than one specific, fixed form or generic template, as genre itself is fluid. All works that incorporate hybridity, at the very least, should not be classified under the same banner. More specifically, the term hybrid genre may be used as a subcategory of genre, not a genre in and of itself; and additionally, the concept of hybridity may benefit from being seen as a tool instead of a genre.

/// ASIDE: HOW “TO GENRE” A BOOK: First, make genre into a verb. Force it to comply to its new boundaries and shed its old. As “to genre,” you can fly, you say, you can swim and dance. You can also just be or note or shrug. Most importantly, you can move or you can have moved or you could have been moving all along. Genre insists on being kept a noun, but only to help you perhaps better address it, but it agrees to try out being a verb simultaneously.

Next, examine a book or the idea of a book. Try a few categories out for it, genre it poetry. Book spits up its breakfast. That’s all I am to you? Genre it prose. Too broad. Entirely too broad. Book starts to list examples of writers who have written in prose, but whose work could be classified in a variety of different ways. Baudelaire and Bakhtin. Joyce and Jameson. Stein. Genre it hybrid. Book bites its tongue. Did I not just accuse you of entirely too much breadth, you’re wasting your breadth… get it? Book laughs a little and then recomposes itself, remembers it’s annoyed. And then you go and— clearly you’re not fit for the task. Book turns to leave.

Genre grows sulky. I was so much happier as a noun. Wait! You cry. I’m sorry! you say. Book and Genre look up at you, patiently. I just—it’s so hard without context to… You trail off. You crack the spine, open to the first page. You begin reading. /// BLACKOUT

In the Afterword to a 2007 PMLA special topics issue on Remapping Genre, Bruce Robbins says, “Ideally, each text would be its own genre,” and I concur. In that vein, a hybrid, ideally and broadly, would combine two or more of what Caroline Levine would call bounded wholes, two or more solids. Texts that are being referred to or promoted as hybrid are often gaseous— they flow, float, smoke, steam. They cover more than one territory, claim their grounds, stake their ground in multiplicity. They work to redefine and redraw boundaries that are drawn in the sand, not formed by tall, insurmountable walls. These works seem to burst from the limits of their front and back covers, though their authors have done something to corral the materials they are working with together and into the space where the work is available to be read. There are eleven known gases on the periodic table, and when elements combine in the right setting, others are named and created. This is not to say that scientists have discovered all known gases or all known combinations of elements that create new gases, but that to name them all the same name simply because they are combinations, without giving the individual parts credit or the combination-as-a-whole a new identifier, likely might be bad for science, bad for language.

Writing that pushes generic limits—in its inventing new ways to tell stories, bending or insisting upon truths, and playing with the way language is used creatively considering variable contexts— has been modified using a variety of terms, such as experimental, avant-garde, postmodern. Each of these terms do not indicate a genre, though, but often an era or context. The term hybrid has been used recently in a similar way to these terms’ past usage, with its etymology largely bypassed. The term, as a modifier of literary texts, is of the twenty-first century era, in many ways, when fluidity is in—and borders and formalism are out.

/// ASIDE: WILD: The way the internet has reshaped the page is worth noting in terms of formalism. With writers composing/composting works written for and on a computer screen, the portrait orientation of a traditional book’s page is out. The landscape orientation of a laptop or computer screen is in. Poetic lines are trending longer. Prose writers refuse indentation in favor of a blank space between paragraphs. Digital printing has made it easier for work to scatter itself across the page, wilding out in ways previously difficult to print off-set. Strict adherence to the left-hand wall of a page is no longer necessary. Wilding out is in. /// BLACKOUT

The nineteenth century saw the introduction of the term hybrid to the English language from the Latin hybrida, which referred to the offspring of wild and domestic pigs. Its use widened in the nineteenth century to mean “The offspring of two animals or plants of different species, or (less strictly) varieties; a half-breed, cross-breed, or mongrel” (“hybrid”). The term’s scientific roots aid in understanding the term’s current, broader use— especially considering that debates in the field of biology have raged in scientific discussions surrounding the term for decades, particularly about the role and effects of defining hybridity within plants. In Hybrid Zones and the Evolutionary Process, a biology anthology edited by Richard G. Harrison, he asks:

Are hybrid populations an important source of evolutionary novelties, or are they evolutionary dead-ends? Under what circumstances are hybrids produced? Should hybrid populations be recognized as distinct species? Although many evolutionary botanists believe that hybridization and introgression are important sources of new variation, the issues are far from resolved.

Harrison goes on to explain how certain scientists use hybridization synonymously with the word “evolution,” a term that many affiliate with progress rather than merely change. Botanists and zoologists take different angles when it comes to this; botanists promote evolution (and therefore hybridity) as progress, while zoologists promote a separation between hybridization and any ideas of evolutionary progress. Harrison says:

Nineteenth century evolutionary biologists [like Darwin] wrote extensively about hybridization, although they focused on experimental studies and the results of plant and animal breeding. Of particular concern was the distinction between “varieties” and “species.” A commonly held view was that crosses between varieties produced mongrel offspring that were perfectly fertile, whereas crosses between species produced sterile hybrid offspring.

Because some of these experiments resulted in sterile animal species, hybridization was initially glossed as a negative, likely reinforcing racist scientific practices and beliefs of the time. Harrison agrees, then, that the best working meaning of the term hybridization for his time (1993) and context (science) would be “the interbreeding of individuals from two populations, or groups of populations, which are distinguishable on the basis of one or more heritable characters… although the parents of a hybrid need differ only in one heritable trait, they must be drawn from populations that are diagnosably distinct for that character.” The more scientists learn about different species and varieties in plants and animals, the more difficult it is to determine how different two breeders must be to produce a hybrid offspring. Not to mention how much more difficult it becomes to separate terms of classification like species and variety.

A definition problem akin to the biological one haunts the term hybrid in literary scholarship. The term’s biological use, despite early racist overtones and still-raging disagreements of what it is exactly referencing in science, eventually broadened so much that twentieth century literary theorists began to use it to refer to certain aspects of their subjects. M.M. Bakhtin uses the term hybrid utterance in his 1934 essay “Discourse in the Novel” to describe the polyphony and heteroglossia existing within the novel that gave it its distinct characteristics unifying form and content. In postcolonial theory, Homi K. Bhabha in his 1994 The Location of Culture argues that the reality of any post-colonial culture is one of hybridity—rather than cultures being linguistically divided or placed in otherwise separate spheres, cultures are overlapping, hybrid. Ideas of hybridity, like his, were used more generally to combat essentialist and nationalist viewpoints, though others argued that they reinforced them due to the term’s emphasis on the combination of that which is fixed. These are leftover ideas from the word’s initial meaning and, as is evident from Harrison’s modified biological definition, largely brushed aside scientific roots. Some linguists argue that all languages are hybrid, challenging the tree model wherein languages developing from similar roots are grouped together separate from those developing from other roots. The word has had many histories and has been through many battles, most of which come down to defining the components of the other components that make up the hybrid—how much they are allowed to have in common and/or what constitutes these components.

The use of the term hybrid is still relatively new in discussions of its relationship to literary genre in particular, and this essay is an attempt to join the discussion within the fields of English Studies and Creative Writing, working through some of the similar definitional problems that its use has caused biology and other fields. Genre is definitionally malleable, in flux, molten, unfixed in time and space, and this creates chaos for anyone who wants to perceive specific genres as fixed notions or bounded wholes. Tantamount to the issue are questions, some answerable and others not: Do the parents of a hybrid work need to be stable, fixed forms for a work to be hybrid? What purpose can a term like hybrid serve now that it is a part of literary vocabulary? If the parent terms being considered as the two (or more) distinct genres that might come together to create a hybrid genre are unstable themselves in definition, can the hybrid itself as a genre exist? Perhaps it can exist, but it cannot stand alone or unqualified. Considering these questions will help the literary world to develop and promote a more sustainable definition of literary hybridity in relation to genre.

In literary works, as in science, because of the sheer amount of works that would fall under its umbrella if it were allowed to do so, the term hybrid is unable to stand on its own without explicit reference to that which it combines; therefore, anyone using hybrid as a word to describe a text’s genre must understand that the elements the text combines as well as the word genre itself are kinetic and tied to their contexts. Just like biologists, as new ideas emerge, struggle to separate terms like species from variety, anyone discussing a literary text might do the same with terms like genre, form,and mode. There seems to be little agreement and consistency in how these concepts are differentiated. Elizabeth Hirsh in her essay “Another Look at Genre: Diving into the Wreck of Ethics with Rich and Irigaray” says:

In these studies, as in literary criticism generally, the term genre is unstable and maybe be associated not only with different levels of generality but also with different and incommensurable criteria of classification. It may denote the most basic categories of literary expression (poetry, narrative, drama), or much more specialized subkinds as defined by form, function, or both (ode or sonnet, elegy or epithalamion); and it may be used either interchangeably with or in contradistinction to modal and stylistic terms such as realism, metafiction, or the sublime. It may be identified with authorial strategies, with inherent properties of a text, or with an aspect of reading competence, a working hypothesis for the production of interpretations.

Genre theorist John Frow would agree with Hirsh, as in his 2006 work, Genre, he says, “One of the inherent problems with working with genre theory is of course the lack of an agreed and coherent terminology.” Because of truth behind statements like these, it is even more important that discussions of hybrid genres and hybridity in literary texts are qualified sustainably, and that the terms scholars use to discuss these aspects of a text are explained when any conversation around genre or form is taking place.

In this essay, I use genre to mean the broad way a culture or society understands a text in relation to other texts. Other genre theorists have attempted to define this term before presenting their work in the field. “Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact,” Frederic Jameson asserts in The Political Unconscious, a statement I largely agree with. Another, albeit longer, definition of genre that I find no quarrel with comes from Caroline Levine via Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network:

Genre involves acts of classifying texts. An ensemble of characteristics, including styles, themes, and marketing conventions, allows both producers and audiences to group texts into certain kinds. Innovations can alter those expectations: an experimental epic might invite readers to expand their sense of the genre’s themes, while the introduction of print extends and transforms a folktale’s audience. Thus any attempt to recognize a work’s genre is a historically specific and interpretive act: one might not be able to tell the historically specific difference between a traditional folktale and a story recently composed for children or to recognize a satire from a distant historical moment.

However, Frow says, “Genre, as I use the term here, is a universal dimension of textuality,” which is a bit too broad for my liking, a broadness his text reflects at times, creating some confusion despite his attempts to provide stability for something he admits is unstable. Using my definition and considering those I have identified as being in agreement with, the four best-known literary genres in twenty-first century America^[2] are poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama, the same four identified by Marcela Sulak in the preface to Family Resemblances and likely the same four most Creative Writing and Literature students in English Studies departments would answer with when prompted. There are, of course, other literary and non-literary genres possible in Western and non-Western cultures, and even more from the past and I suspect into the future. The more accurately a text’s relationship to its contemporary reading public has been historically recorded, the more easily scholars can name the text’s specific genre—considering its genre in context to its time as well as what we might now call its genre. For example, Cervantes’ Don Quixote is considered literature’s first novel, though it was understood as a romance or a parody of chivalric romance at the time. There are also genres, even contemporary ones, that fall outside of those four major categories or are culturally known combinations of them—the verse novel (Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire) and lyric essay (Maggie Nelson’s Bluets) both come to mind, as does Eileen Myles’ Inferno, subtitled “a poet’s novel”. These are good examples of categorically hybrid genres, as they combine elements from two or more genres and have thus created a genre of their own in doing so. Length also plays a role in genre, as a short story, novella, and novel are all fiction genres, yet their lengths—and therefore their cultural and social purpose—differ. Because genre is social and cultural, it is unstable and fluid and shifts across time and geography.

When I use the term form, I mean the structural aspects of a text and the words that may have been used to describe these aspects in part and when combined. In poetry, for example, form involves combinations of meter, line length, rhyme, and whether or not a work is in prose or verse. Most fiction is prose in paragraphs, but works of fiction may formally exist as all one paragraph (Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place) or be in verse form (The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo or, again, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov). A sonnet is a form of the genre poetry, for example, in that it combines a variety of structural aspects. Drama may take the form of a stage play or a screenplay. It is notable that Levine uses the word form in the title of her critical work Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network and within the critical text itself to describe different organizing principles more generally and call for a reboot of formalist thinking. Formalism implies attention to structure, and form is often more generally used to imply any sort of structure—physical structures, spatial ones, abstract organizing principles, and combinations of these. The word form, then, has a larger meaning outside of its use when discussing literary form, and a distinction must be made. Though Levine’s book discusses both literary and non-literary forms (novels as well as gender, for example), her use of the word form understandably differs from mine in its breadth; that being said, I find her work as a New Formalist helpful in understanding how genre is a form (in her sense), what category of form it might be (a network), and how others have misunderstood it as something else (a bounded whole or hierarchy). However, excluding quotations from others or when I am working with Levine’s ideas, I use form in this critical essay to mean structural aspects within a larger text, as described above.

Subgenres are primarily used in discussions of the novel, and when so they comprise of categories more widely used to make up what is called, confusingly, genre fiction. Subgenres are smaller categories of genre that indicate a specificity, usually a theme apparent to a certain group of texts that fall under a larger genre category. In relation to this, Frow says:

Whilst any genre (the novel, say) can subsume smaller sets within it (sub-genres such as the novel of manners or ideas, the detective novel, the picaresque, or the historical novel), there can be no such hierarchical relation between modes and genres, since [as Gerard Genette says,] “mode neither includes nor implies theme; theme neither includes nor implies mode.”

The pre-fix sub, Frow argues here, does not indicate lesser. For example, a novel does not exist as a superior genre to a novel of manners—a novel of manners, though, is a category of a type of novel that exists under the umbrella of different subgenres of the novel. Every novel of manners is a novel, but not every novel is a novel of manners.

Mode, on the other hand, is more likely to be used in relationship to poetry. Frow says, “Rather than standing alone, modes are usually qualifications or modifications of particular genres”; in other words, a mode is a more specific aspect of genre. The major difference, then, between mode and subgenre would be that subgenre implies theme and mode implies idea. As for the major difference between mode and form, form implies structure and mode does not. The best example is how poetry is often divided into three modes: lyric, epic, and dramatic. Each of these three poetic modes functions under the umbrella of poetry, yet they have different functions from each other. This begins with Aristotle and moves forward through time, with the modes acquiring and discharging ideas as they change context, illustrating how malleability of genre is also present in mode—and providing clarification for why confusion between the two terms exists. Additionally, terms that might be called modes today were in past contexts understood as genres, due to the way they were defined against one another and their larger importance to society and culture.^[3] Based on these definitions, hybridity, I argue, makes the most sense when understood as an instrument used to combine forms, modes, subgenres, and genres themselves— or as a category of genre, and genre more broadly is best understood as a network that allows for these crossovers and for shifts through time and geography.

It’s clear that hybrid isn’t the only term with a definition problem. Perhaps this is the strongest argument for its careful use in literary contexts moving forward. To provide an example of another existing term used frequently by literary theorists, one that is crucial to this essay’s larger conversations about poetry, and one with its own definition problem, scholars and writers alike have been debating for over a century about the history of, and how to define, the lyric mode of poetry. In their General Introduction to The Lyric Theory Reader, editorsVirginia Jackson and Yopie Prins admit, “perhaps the lyric has become so difficult to define because we need it to be blurry around the edges.” Lyric theory thrives within the dialectic between wanting to define lyric coherently and admitting the nature of genre is volatile. College freshmen today, asked to define lyric, would most likely answer something along the lines of, “you mean, like, the words to a song?” The history of the constructed nature of the best-known triumvirate of poetic modes is complicated to say the least.

Though the three modes are typically seen as having roots in his Poetics, Aristotle defines the different principles of poetry as, “Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.” Some genre theorists argue that dithyrambic poetry, which gets little attention in what survives of the Poetics, morphed over time into what we today call lyric poetry. Dithyrambic poetry, from what we can tell considering Aristotle’s context, was that which was written with a meter and set to music, and this positions these generic distinctions on an even more slippery slope, as today’s music is not always studied alongside its literary works^[4]. Genette dismantles arguments likening dithyrambic and lyric poetry in his 1979 essay, “The Architext,” tracing the false history of lyric poetry in search of the truth of how contemporary genre scholars came to include it in place of “dithyramb” as one of Aristotle’s three modes of poetry along with dramatic and epic. Genette refuses to give a clear definition of lyric, preferring instead to look at the various ways it had been used over time. He positions modern literary critics as those who have been re-historicizing the lyric rather than looking at how the word was being used in its different contexts over time. Genette doesn’t see the emergence of a definition of lyric that looks anything close to what we understand it as today until the seventeenth century in Spain. He believes there to be “no natural privilege” to the idea that there are three archetypal genres, stating that “any genre can always contain several genres”. Genette’s study and conclusion can be read as a tale of caution.

Jackson and Prins trace the lyric’s history, false or not, and locate a turning point in the defining of generic modes of poetry in Goethe, who in 1819—quite some time after Aristotle—labels the “three natural forms of poetry” as narrative, lyric, and dramatic, departing from traditional inclusion of epic in favor of simply narrative and replacing Aristotle’s dithyramb with the lyric. Most distinctions in Western poetics followed suit, funneling poetry (rather than all of literary writing) into one of three categories, according to The Lyric Theory Reader’s introduction.

Jackson and Prins work their way through the Romantics’ generic triumvirates to more recent meanings of the lyric specifically. In the 1820s-1830s, Hegel defines it as a difficult-to-produce work into which the poet must pour his whole self. In 1833, John Stuart Mill elevates it, positioning it as “more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other”. Lyric, from Hegel to Mill, shifts from that which “would move civilization forward” to that which “would have to be the representative of both original nature and acquired culture”. Mill’s lyric poetry was overheard, unconscious, transcendent—nearly an impossible feat to produce: to write verse that was so close to a poet’s self that expressing it meant the poet was unaware of having an audience.

This definition invites poetry, specifically lyric poetry, to be more inclusive of different forms, leaving Jackson and Prins to declare in their introduction that when most people in the twentieth century said poetry they meant lyric poetry. Yet the lyric as a specific type of poetry lives on despite that idea, as in “The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric,” where Elizabeth Willis defines lyric against Language poetry: “Lyric is conventionally defined first by length (under one hundred lines and usually less than fifty), but even the stodgiest sources then acknowledge other more mysterious qualities: its privileging of sound over meaning; its difference in time signature; its divergence from mimesis.”

As such the lyric is subsumed into poetry as a whole but still maintains some sort of integrity as its own mode of poetry, and new definitional problems arise as time moves on, such as the great Language/lyric divide of the late twentieth century or today’s issues with the breadth that the term hybrid is too often expected to cover.

With the advent of a new way to use an old term, many questions arise. Is a poem utilizing hybridity if it utilizes dramatic monologue and lyric modes to create its verse? Or must it reach outside of the genre of poetry all together? Does dramatic monologue exist separately from lyric altogether as a mode in twenty-first century poetry? Dramatic poetry seems to be the least discussed mode in the twentieth century, yet scholars and teachers still cling to it as “the” third poetic mode. Has dramatic poetry been handed over to dramatists, who have used it to create something like William Wallace’s speech in Braveheart or Audrey’s in Little Shop of Horrors? Perhaps these modes and ways of distinguishing form—the difference, for example, between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet—are best reserved for pedagogical purposes. The Modernist writers and thinkers of the twentieth century, in their efforts to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound famously espoused, created poetry more broadly, defying the confining, institutional definitions that tried to enclose the modes as bounded wholes and deny their history as genres whose contexts and therefore meanings shifted with the times.

The nineteenth century gave the world photography, and the twentieth century set those pictures in motion with film and didn’t stop there. Radios and televisions arrived in many, even most, American homes by its end, and the beginning of the twenty-first century saw the proliferation of the internet, which has only exploded its expanse of power and influence since its inception. With each new medium came many different ways to “make it new”: new forms, new modes, new categories altogether. Writers previously bound to the page took their talents to scripts and the invention of singular ways of creating, such as GIF poetry or podcasting. Many new categories do not stop with their creators and the limitations of one person’s audience; globalization continues to foster a new, unprecedented level of connectivity, with border-crossing happening in more than form and genre. Ideas travelled the world more quickly at first with faster transportation of materials and finally with the ability for someone to publish something online, giving it the potential for an international audience nearly instantaneously.

With new ways to communicate being invented almost every year, it seems, problems of naming would likely increase more rapidly—amongst other more serious problems. American literary history teaches that what is distinct is what sticks—imitation perhaps begets innovation— but initial derivative forms, for example poems in strict rhyme and meter copying the British books available to the first American colonists, are not celebrated for their inventiveness. Only those who bring something new to the world could be considered true to the American Voice, or so F. O. Matthiessen has had scholars believe. Postmodernism, however, insists that there is no such thing as new, let alone anything real, everything a ctrl/alt/del followed by a copy/paste atop a simulacrum, nothing original possible.

How, then, to marry these two ideas: nothing new possible within American art and the idea that American art is not tenable without making something new?

Perhaps poets and writers see this possibility in promotion of works that are of distinctly hybrid genres (the emergence lately of the lyric essay or writers who give their works distinct genres in subtitles) and in works that overtly utilize and promote hybridity as an important tool—or the most important tool used to create the work. Amy Moorman Robbins in American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form, hypothesizes that “claims to the newness of hybrid poetics decontextualizes” the roots of such works, which she claims “have a firm foundation and a distinct history in the work of radical women poets from throughout the past century…poets who have created such mixings as part of a resistance to being fixed in any particular school of camp.” While I agree that the way hybridity is discussed as a twenty-first century fad does a disservice to its history, I extend what that history is, and what the definition of hybrid poetries are moving forward, not limiting it to work by politically motivated women writers.

The overused and under-defined nature of the word hybrid beckons for a sustainable use. This should be of interest to scholars, poets, and publishers alike, considering that some terminologies have the opposite problem as hybrid and lyric—they are proposed and then vanish. For example, Mark Wallace conjures the term “free multiplicity of form”:                       

Any promotion of a free multiplicity of form cannot be restrained to a discussion of boundary crossings, permutations, and multiplicities solely in literature. Rather, a free multiplicity of form extends past and opens the boundaries between various art forms, exploring the relations between the visual arts and literature, music and literature, any form of art with any other form of art.

The no-boundaries poetry that Wallace is proposing here sounds much like works that today might be called hybrid. Another term that went extinct before it could gain traction is “cyberpoetry,” synonymous with Electronic poetry, which Christopher Funkhouser describes as having hybrid qualities: “Cyberpoetry is a nonparticular, hybrid form, a form that is not yet whole, comprising many parts, authorial energies, and nascent technological capabilities.” The word hybrid, though, has an etymology and a history to back up its continued use, unlike these terms that have fallen out of fashion before ever gaining traction.

Deploying the term hybrid as a genre creates more confusion than clarity. Hybridity should be understood not as a genre but as a tool, one that has been utilized in all literary and popular genres. Hybridity could also be considered a sub-category of genre rather than a genre of its own. Acknowledging the roots of a hybrid when discussing its genre will help to alleviate the confusion that is created by too many diverse works having the same generic appellation. Those most invested in literature—writers, editors, scholars, and publishers—know how important words—the way they travel and make light, pulse, shimmer, fade, and carry on—can be.

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[1] A good example of this is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, about which Brian Kim Stefans in “Remote Parsee: An Alternative Grammar of Asian North American Poetry” says, “Cha’s work had gotten limited exposure in Asian American literary communities because of its deconstructionist and hybrid formal characteristics, which seemed to make it unassimilable to the social-realist paradigms then ascendant.”

[2] Due to the reach of internet, it is even more difficult to confine genre to one country or culture—borders are out—but scholars have been known to draw lines in the sand, and as long as one admits the waves will come and wash those lines away, leaving a trace of what once and making space for what will be, we will continue to draw lines in the sand.

[3] More on how genres have become modes and modes can be come genres can be found within the discussion of the lyric below.

[4] The Nobel Prize committee did award Bob Dylan their 2016 award in Literature, though, bringing attention to how other media outside of text on a page, despite utilization of words and language in a creative way, often does not get studied alongside literature in English collegiate programs. When it does, it is often trivialized due to the media of its origin not being “literary.” E.g. pop music or Broadway shows are not given the same critical attention in literature classes offered by English departments as poetry or novels.

Bibliography

Antonetta, Susanne Paola. “Riddling the Sphinx: An Introduction to Hybridity.” Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Genres. Ed. Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov, Rose Metal Press, 2015, pp. xix-xxxiii.

Aristotle. “Poetics.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams, Revised Edition, Heinle & Heinle, 1992, pp. 50-66.

Bakhtin, M.M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Ed. Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 259-422.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Frow, John. Genre. 2^nd edition, Routledge, 2015.

Funkhouser, Christopher. “A cyber-Editor’s statement.” Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. The University of Alabama Press, 2002, pp. 132-144.

Genette, Gerard. “The Architext.” The Lyric Theory Reader, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 15-30.

Harrison, Richard G. editor. Hybrid Zones and the Evolutionary Process. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Hirsh, Elizabeth. “Another Look at Genre: Diving into the Wreck of Ethics with Rich and Irigaray.” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. The University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp.117-138.

Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins. “General Introduction.” The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 1-8.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981.

“hybrid, n. and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2017. Web. 2 September 2017.

Levine, Carolyn. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Robbins, Bruce. “Afterward.” “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1644-1651.

Robbins, Amy Moorman. American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form. 2014, Rutgers University Press.

Stefans, Kim Brian. “Remote Parsee: An Alternative Grammar of Asian North American Poetry.” Wallace, Mark and Stephen Marks, editors. Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. The University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Wallace, Mark. “Towards a Free Multiplicity of Form.” Wallace, Mark and Stephen Marks, editors. Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. The University of Alabama Press, 2002, pp. 191-203.

Willis, Elizabeth. “The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric.” Wallace, Mark and Stephen Marks, editors. Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. The University of Alabama Press, 2002, pp. 225-235.