A ladder, a hammer, a husk, a game: 34 ways of looking at ‘genre'

1.

Genre as a commercial taxonomy that tells you, the consumer, where the commodity you seek is located in the shop.

2.

Genre as the husk or exuvia innovation leaves behind. 

3.

Genre as scaffolding, or as the ladder one throws away once one has climbed it, see 2.

4.

Genre as a system of boxes; see. 1. Everything must stay in its appropriate box. Alternatively, you may mix and match.

5.

Genres as a system of propriety.

6.

Genre as the water cycle of tradition: atmospheric moisture; glaciers; wetlands; rivers, tributaries, confluences, etc.

7.

Genre as fandom-lifestyle predicated on 1., 4., & 5.

8.

Genre as armature. 

9.

Genre as corsetry. Or, genre as dress as such: textile, weave, loops, lines.

10.

Genre as sublimation. 

11.

Genre as a semi-solid congealed out of the flows of 6.

12.

Genre as something to be occasionally utilised by its social betters, subverted, etc, towards more serious ends.

13.

Genre as a system of interlocking games.

14.

Genre as a system of codes continuously decoded & re-encoded.

15.

‘Thatcher wasn’t Thatcherite, she was merely herself.’ Tolkien wasn’t Tolkienesque. cf. 2.

16.

Genre as Content. Or: genre as Form.

17.

Genre as manifest content. Or, genre as latent content.

18.

Genre as the sleight in a sleight of hand; or the hand.

19.

Genre as a terrain mapped as if by Diagnostic & Statistical Manual: tick certain boxes, receive certain diagnoses.

20.

‘Slipstream’: the divides of 4. are themselves boxes.

21.

Genre as a red herring.

22.

Genre as the bait but not the switch.

23.

Genre as fan service. ‘Serious’ works of genre as fan disservice.

24.

Genre as invented tradition.

25.

Genre as a hammer. Or, genre as Heidegger’s broken hammer.

26.

Genre as launch complex.

27.

Genre as avoidance strategy.

28.

Genre as the nightmare that weighs on the brains of the living.

29.

Genre as the map but not the territory. Or, genre as the territory but not the map. Or, genre as paper territory made of maps.

30.

Genre as the creation of precursors in the sense of Borges’s Kafka & His Precursors: ‘The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now.’

31.

Genre as mechanical form.

32.

Genre as conversation.

33.

Genre as something you must escape, cf. 4; but, simultaneously, genre as something you cannot escape.

34.

Genre as something you shouldn’t overthink.