[reposting] "Who decides what genre is?"

In analyzing the exhibit by Edouard Duval- Carrie, it was very interesting to see how different these exhibits really were. Most of the exhibits really did go outside of the usual genre conventions. Often, I found myself not really knowing how to dissect the images in the sense of characterizing them in a certain way, which in a way was a good experience for me considering I shouldn't necessarily go into a piece, assuming that there is a whole conventional genre collection present. After attending the exhibit and being able to read Bawarshi article about genre function, it definitely opened my eyes more to the altering ideas of what genre really is and entails. Bawashi breaks the article into the different types of genres can act as- genre as site of literary action and genre as site of social action. This is interesting to see that genre can have more of a usual definition in terms of interpreting a text based on other literary texts that you have experience with; however, with genre being a form of social action, this shows how texts can be interpreted based on ones social aptitude and that ones life can alter the interpretation and translation of a piece into a different genre. Bawarshi says that “when writers begin to write in different genres, they participate within these different sets of relations, relations that motivate them, consciously or unconsciously, to invent both their texts and themselves.” (17). C. Miller responds to this point by proving the social function in a way by saying that, genre function is “an aspect of cultural rationality”. I saw in the art exhibit that the lines and colors of the art was very simple and streamlined and really made me think of Longinus’s idea of the sublime. He talked a lot in his article about how beyond all of the hype and galore of glamorous of some art forms or of texts that use a lot of words to tell a story that can be understood and translated with fewer words because it is the soul that is supposed to interpret, according to him.

The idea of the sublime is different than emotional conventions; it is more a basis of the soul and the interpretation that can come out of simplicity of strong, structured words. The exhibits really do complicate the idea of genre because it doesn't necessarily fit into a certain contexts. This can add more value to Foucault’s idea of author-function. Bawarshi says that “I propose to subsume what Foucault calls the author-function within what I am calling the genre function, which constitutes all discourses’ and all writers’ modes of existence, circulation and functioning within a society, whether the writer is William Shakespeare or a social worker and whether the text is a sonnet or an assessment report” (22). Genre conventions vary, they are interpreted differently, they are viewed differently but also the author themselves decide to illicit genres different. Like when do subgenre’s become genre’s? When do they become vital? This is up to the author. So Edouard Duval- Carrie just decided for himself how to interpret the idea of genre and put art into form. I really enjoyed the art and being challenged by the idea of genre.