Genre in literary studies and in linguistics

• a huge difference in the ages of the respective traditions:
  • in literary studies, there is uninterrupted continuum of genre theories ever since Aristotle
  • in linguistics, genre theory is a recent phenomenon—mainly since the 1980’s
• the opening of discussion by Bakhtin in the 1950’s was ignored
• the literary scholars were the first to get in touch with Bakhtin’s ideas on genre—the linguists took a slower start