Fish and Genre

Fish’s story of his classroom experiment seems to coincide with and reinforce some of the more general conclusions both made in our class and expressed in Chandler’s writing.

Chandler says in Working Within Genres that attaching a genre to a work oftentimes stunts the potential for interpretation for that work. This is confirmed by the actions of Fish’s students who insisted on analyzing and interpreting the list of names on the board as a work of Christian poetry. One might ask why none of them stopped and asked if these words were just names but then again it could be explained that we’ve grown to expect poetry or art to be at least slightly odd or obtuse. “I don’t understand it, so it must be art” as the old adage goes.

They expected a poem and so they saw a poem, blocking out any possible interpretation of evidence that there might have been of an alternate interpretation. It’s comparable to looking for images in clouds. If you only expect clouds to be white, fluffy shapeless things that’s probably all you’re going to see but if you expect them to start forming images in the sky well soon enough you’re going to see a bunny rabbit.

Take our recent discussion concerning the make up of a “Western” for example. All of us mentioned things that should be found in the “typical” movie about the west and they all seemed to fit. But there were some Westerns that weren’t mentioned. Many commented on the lack of women in Westerns but what about Hannie Coulter: a Western in which the entire story focuses around a woman. Was it not mentioned because no one knew about it or because we started looking things that fit into mold we’d begun to create?