Talkin' 'Bout My Genre-ation

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Be grotesque, be picaresque. Just be. (Calvin Klein)

Sorry, couldn't resist. What I was actually going to say is that I believe
questions of genre - they may be unanswerable in the end, but nevertheless
sometimes some kind of general consensus might be achieved - are quite
important for the understanding of a literary work. By "understanding" I do
not mean a rather abstract statement like "V. is a picaresque novel", although
this may be true, but the individual's perception of the text in front of
him/her. As soon as I state that the opening chapter of V. is not written in a
realistic manner, we might enter problems of genre. Now, this might seem
obvious to you, but recent P-list discussions have shown that some things some
people might perceive as being obvious are not at all obvious to others. The
best examples for the importance of genre are perhaps satire and parody,
because they are decidedly intertextual forms. If you do not recognize the
target of a satire or the object of a parody you are not able to perceive it
as a satire or parody and this certainly takes out a whole lot of the fun.
Cases in point would be Don Quijote, Shamela, Ulysses, to name but a few. This
is to say that matters of genre are not merely an abstract  lit crit thing but
of vital importance to the actual reading process - although you certainly
don't have to know the terms etc.

Just Thomas' opinion