Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Quote:I think perhaps we have been using the term
> "genre" inprecisel--that is, until your
> contributions.
>
> I think that I'll demur from the over-inclusive
> "we". The sense in which I used the term genre was
> quite evident: Horror fiction, fantasy fiction,
> realistic fiction, romance fiction, etc. If these
> aren't "genres", then tell me what they are,
> please, because these categories do seem to
> correspond to forms of literature as people
> conceive them.
I believe that this is the conventional usage, against which you are railing.
Here's a conventional definition that I pulled off of the web:
GENRE: A type of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions. The three broadest categories of genre include poetry, drama, and fiction. These general genres are often subdivided into more specific genres. For instance, precise examples of genres might include murder mysteries, western films, sonnets, lyric poetry, epics, tragedies, etc.
[
guweb2.gonzaga.edu]
Seems like a good, broad-based, commonly held definition, doesn't it?
> My post that originated this thread
> wasn't about defining the niceties of the term
> genre, though; for my purposes, the schema I
> outlined above was quite sufficient. As so often
> happens, however, the discussion has mutated in
> such a way that it no longer has anything to do
> with the concerns that prompted me to start this
> thread. That's fine, of course--hijackings occur
> all the time, and I'm as guilty of this as
> any--but this fact means I don't really have much
> to contribute to the current discussion. I'll
> simply repeat what I wrote in response to Mikey_C:
> The notion that there exists one category called
> "literature" and a series of sub-sets of
> literature denoted by their (alleged) dominant
> attributes is arbitrary. My entire point is that
> one can make a "genre" out of anything, including
> mainstream literature, as I indicated using the
> example of Dickens.
Up to this point I can agree wholeheartedly. This seems emminiently sensible because works well to describe the actual logical delineations: poetry, prose, theatre as the 1st level of literature (itself a genre); horror, SF, war, etc., as sub-sets. It could go lower, perhaps: "feminist fantasy", or even "militant feminist Marxist fantasy".
I'll agree that it gets silly after a while, but there is value in categorization, if for no other reason than to ease the comparison of similar works. We won't likely try comparing Hemingway against Tolkein, unless we're out for something pretty unusual.
>I dislike the notion of norms
> and (ostensibly inferior) deviations from that
> norm in the arts, that's all.
But from here on, you are evidently flogging a dead horse, the saving grace being that it's *your own* dead horse, to do with as you wish.
This is like nothing so much as the dowager aunt who detests flatulence and therefore never mentions it, in hopes that somehow this will rid the world of it. Of course, it won't; it only "marginalizes" her--or rather, she willfully marginalizes herself.
But no doubt this is the way she likes it...