Genre and Worldmaking

    Bakhtin, in his opening classification of categories of the novel genre through history, illustrates the temporality characteristic of travel novels, in particular, with exemplar descriptive phrases typical of this sub-genre.  Folk psychologists Jerome Bruner and Carol Feldman, in their studies of worldmaking through narrative in the 1990s, leveraged such genre-distinctiveness of words and word phrases to quantitatively identify qualitative features of different narrative forms.  In one such study, the key characteristics of group-defining stories--lexically patterning, autobiographic, and hermeneutic--were identified.  In a second, the hermeneutic understanding and recall of narratives in accordance with genre-type intuitions was demonstrated.  

    Where Bakhtin addresses how lexical patterns reveal categorically meaningful features of genre, Dumont brings the autobiographical aspect of group-defining narratives to the fore:  what is at once the story of a nation or people is at the very same moment a story of the individual representative of the same group.  Dumont thereafter explores the hermeneutic effect of genre as applied to narrative, in his discussion of the contrasting intuitive expectations (and thus understandings) of the Bildungsroman form as encountered by interpreters approaching from the orientating genre of the French Enlightenment.