Literary Kinds

As we are reading these articles and blog posts about the genre of blogs, I began to think about why I read the blogs I read, and why I don't write one myself. (The second was fairly obvious, and flows from the first: I have a dairy, but a truly private, paper and pen documentation of lists and life, because nothing I say has a purpose besides fulling a need I have to catalog my life.) But I also realized as McNeill mentioned that "I am drawn to Web diaries that most closely resemble traditional literary tests" (25) that all of the blogs I read are by authors (and while I do not read many blogs, this is still, I believe, significant). They are usually by authors who have written books I like, and who do not often post meaningless rambles.

Genres are used to classify or "ground" a subject. To have a piece of literature named an "epic" emphasizes certain qualities and may even give it qualities that can then be used in analysis. To give it an identity is to immediately restrict the work to a preconceived paradigm. The authors of the two pieces we read (Wai Chee Dimock and Stephen Owen) actively reject this. Are Dimock and Owen afraid of the oversimplifiation of literature, something of which that should be appreciated for the complexity within itself?

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.