Literary Kinds

 Perhaps our past discussion influenced how I read Folsom's essay, but what captured me in his words was not an argument about databases and archives, or even about his own Walt Whitman Archive; it was his conflict between the organization of literature and the constraints of genres. Folsom remarks that "peculiarity to person, period, or place always leads to division and discrimination, always moves away from and against universality" (1572). Everything that I read in Folsom's writing seemed to me to center around the limitations of genre. Whitman himself pushed against the restraints of being bound into one idea, one limited section of the written word.

When reading Wai Chee Dimock's article "Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge," I found myself agreeing with the author's theorization that the concept of genre in literature is meant to be seen as a general guideline to categorize things rather than a way to, as Dimock said, "put things into a pigeonhole."  Branching off that same idea, Dimock also expressed the idea that genre should not limit a work of literature.  Just because it's categorized as epic or lyric doesn't mean that the work has to entirely fit a certain format, and there is room for change in all genres that inevitably comes with time and the gathering of new knowledge.

In thinking more about and sharing the images we read in class on Tuesday, I found that the in-between nature of the images seemed to cause discomfort to me and others. Why should the existence of in-between objects elicit disgust? Similarly, our readings mentioned historical attempts by Westerners to either make other cultures' literary works fit into Western genres or establish those other cultures as deficient for not matching the Western pattern closely. Why is maintaining the open mind to the evolution of genre that Dimock and Owen call for so difficult? Do we need computers to do this for us?

When considering the definition of the word genre it seems highly unlikely that one could classify every piece of writing in a manner that is organized and logical, yet mankind creates taxonomies for everything in life--literature included. The question seems to be why would one insist on a method of sorting texts by genres if it proves to be as dysfunctional as both Wai Chee Dimock and Stephen Owen claim? The answer seems to be that even the most general of divisions, such as the epic, lyric, and narrative, provide clarification for the public to a certain extent. Although a text might not perfectly fit in a prototypical genre, it could still qualify for the genre if it meets the general standards.

 The definition of "genre" is dependent upon the personal and public opinion of the era. As Stephen Owen points out, a piece of literature once defined a "history" can change, along with the generation and its opinions, to become instead a "romance," and even then to "the novel in antiquity," simply by one individual's translation. But if what is supposed to be a defining marker of the contents of a work can be thrown away so easily, as "unwanted baggage," then genre cannot be anything more than a classification based upon the thoughts and beliefs of the public and intellectuals of the time. Wai Chee Dimock speaks of the "history of genre"; but is it not more fitting to say the genres of history?

 Both of these articles were similar in the fact that not only did they look at genre as being defined and morphed by history and culture, but also at genre as one way in which culture can be shaped. It was discovered that China did not have an early epic (Owen, 1390) and Europeans brought their own perception of what an epic was to Chinese culture. Would a different type of Chinese "epic" have developed had the European ideas not invaded? Would this Chinese epic have created a new genre? Would other writing then have fallen into this new genre? Referring to genres, Dimock says that "none does its work in isolation, and none without a continuous stream of input from other genres" (1380).

The use of genre as a classifying method seems at first, and deceptively, to be a mere practical necessity--an organizing tool of the intellect to make the overly abundant world of phenomena accessible within the limits of perception and analysis. The more one considers genre, however, the more one realizes that the manner in which we make such a world accessible is not passive, rather an active selection informed by cultural imperatives. Inevitably, such selection (and selective omission) leads to categories and hierarchies that point less to the inherent qualities of the object as to human motivations to delimit and exalt certain perceived characteristics.

What struck me was that both readings, though arriving at their destinations by completely different routes (one through the digital age, one through ancient history), managed to depit genre as something fluid from the very begining --no matter what human beings attempt to mold it into. Neither author put on the appearance of believing that genre is (and was) just as simple as a division into epic, lyric, and dramatic.