> I asked,
> "And can the genre and the story be separated in
that way? The genre is
> manifested in the works."
> And Mark answered:
> Of course they can be separated. For instance, can't
we all think of
> plenty of books which are undeniably part of the
genre which are awful
> stories? [snip] So quality can be totally
independent of its place in the
> genre.
I wasn't thinking of the quality. I meant to say that stories
are not independent of the genre and genre is not independent
of the stories. We wouldn't know there is a genre if there
would be no works in it. Even the stupidest P.I. stories with
girls and guns and chases form the P.I. genre as much as
Chandler or Parker. The word "genre" cannot be used when the
quality of the work is being described.
Does that make any sense? What I meant to say was that the
genre leads to works, but the works equally lead to the
genre. (This begins to sound like the eternal hen-egg
question. Which one comes first? The works, perhaps, but one
might say that even the groundstone work in a genre (say
Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings") don't come out of nowhere.
They have their own predecessors.)
Juri
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Mar 2001 EST