Use of Genre in Wunderkammer

First, when looking at Susan Delagrange’s Wunderkammer I’m instantly reminded of the cut-up technique that William Burroughs’ expounded upon in his The Future of the Novel. Burroughs explains that his fold-in method, in which he folds a page from a text down the middle and places it on another page to form a composite text. He argues that his “From two pages an infinite number of combinations and images are possible… the method could also lead to a collaboration between writers on an unprecedented scale to produce works that were the composite effort of any number of writers living and dead.” Burroughs intended for his works to be read a certain way. He seemed to have the idea that his composite works would still all have their pages related to one another to create something that was still a narrative with a notable order. Wunderkammer seems to take Burroughs’ technique steps further as its pages are more loosely connected. And the reader is prompted to go through them in order but may choose several more different ways to read through the slides of information. 

Anis Bawarshi argues that “genres help reproduce the very recurring situations to which they respond,” meaning that genres are “constitutive rather than merely regulative.” (Bawarshi 24) Susan Delagrange, whether entirely aware of the power of genre or not, is using genre(s) in the work to facilitate how users interact with and make meaning out of the slides of the Wunderkammer. It may be said also that genre controlled how the slides were made. It is clear through the language Delagrange uses that the work is meant to be a read somewhat like a textbook or by higher academia. If written in another way that would change the way Wunderkammer is read, and therefore, the impact of the message received.

Delagrange plays with genre, mixing up the different approaches to writing with the text. With a text as unconventional as Delagrange’s, if a reader is familiar with the type of writing, even only able to make the barest connection to some piece of academic/scholarly essay writing, it eases how a viewer reads through Wunderkammer. The mixing of different genres makes the text more interesting though. A reader doesn’t have to read the slides in order, but can still receive meaning from the text.

In some ways can it be said that Delagrange works against genre? Such innovative use of technology to make the text might work against the ease of genre facilitation by being unfamiliar to a viewer of the text. That isn’t to say a reader of the text would be completely confused, but might the message be distorted?