Fish, Chandler, Eagleton, a Poem?

I think what Eagleton says about the reader's mental re-writing of any 'literary' work pretty much sums up everything we've actually concluded about genre and confirms Chandler's dynamic genre theory: "No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process." Eagleton goes on to conclude that what we understand as genre is not an objective collection of works, but a subjective assumption based on ideology used to keep certain social groups in power, a notion we touched on in class regarding genre.

Fish better explained how we understand genre. Our cognitive processes have slowly built a subjective understanding of words, actions, and images, based heavily upon context. In the case of his Christian poetry class' assignment, it was not "that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities."
Why do I know that Saving Private Ryan is a war movie and Sleepless in Seattle is a romantic comedy? They both star Tom Hanks (which I guess means they fall into the genre of Tom Hanks movies)? Certain developed understandings (and in reverse, expectations) regarding what we perceive when we see either movie make this classification possible. Eagleton gives the example of Greek tragedy. We look at Greek tragedy from our modern understanding, but where we to find evidence the Greeks saw them as say, comedy, we might lose interest. Society tells me that when the first 10 minutes of a movie is a gory depiction of an amphibious assault, that movie will not end up being a romantic comedy.
This works in reverse too. When a movie is advertised as part of a particular genre, our accumulated cognition recognizes what to expect, thus, we can all discriminate in our movie choices.

Fish's classroom example of the raised hand reminds me of the last few pages of Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht's second installment to the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook series, dealing with travel. In the section named "Gestures to Avoid," the gesture in America which means OK, seen above, varies in meaning greatly in different cultures.
Anyone can think of a million times they've used the OK sign. Here, it's a sign of reassurance, agreement, or acceptance. However, hop across the Atlantic to France and the OK sign is an insult implying worthlessness. If placed over the nose, it implies drunkenness. Move across France's eastern frontier to Germany and you'll find that the OK sign is symbolic of a "very private orifice" (as well as in Brazil and Russia). Now go to Japan, where you can flash the OK sign to any cashier without insulting. Why? In Japan it's indicative of the desire for change.