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Rosmarin’s painting metaphor is helpful to me in understanding her distinction between the particular and the general and how they relate to genre. The painter Chuck Close comes to mind: his paintings are composed of thousands of small squares, and he fills each square with ovals of several colors. Up close, his paintings look like blobs of colors in squares; step back, and they are strikingly “realistic” portraits of ordinary people. Here are some examples.
The genre critic is the painter, the squares are texts, and the painting as a whole is a “definition” of a genre. A text, like a square, is “itself and not-itself, both what it is and what it seems.” Because we’re always looking for similarities, order, and meaning, we see the blobs as a face and we see a play as a tragedy if enough of its elements add up to give us that impression. What’s interesting to me about Close’s work is that if you look at any two adjacent squares, the colors will often be very different; they don’t melt into each other but remain distinct. Yet they have a very intimate relationship and are obviously carefully crafted with the intent to give an overall impression. This is what the critics do when they create a genre. They pick certain texts and arrange them according to what elements the texts have, in such a way as to lead their readers to see “similarity in the midst of and in spite of difference.” I don’t know how much further you could take this painting metaphor. For example, I don’t understand how, if a painting is genre, two completely different-looking squares can be part of the same painting and still hold to the metaphor; I don't think she is saying that two texts can be completely different and be part of the same genre.