Genre Restricts!

Both Fish and Chandler try to convey the power of genre and how it effects ones interpretation of what is read. As found in Chandler’s work An Introduction to Genre Theory we are given the opinion of John Hartley who writes, " genres are agents of ideological closure-they limit the meaning -potential of a given text’". This quote totally summerize’s what Stanley Fish writes about in his lecture, "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" for when his students where given a list of names and assumed that they where a poem, had created a whole skew of symbols and ideas based upon that assumption. As seen with the lines, " In addition to specifying for the words of the poem and relating those significances for the words of the poem and relating those significances to one another, the students began to discern larger structural patterns. It was noted that of the six names in the poem three- -Jacobs, Rosenbaum, and Levin—are Hebrew."
One is able to conclude that by attributing the list of names as a genre of poetry, the students where able to attribute poetic themes to de-construct it and make sense of it. By doing this, Fish finds a flaw in the genre theory of being a tool for "identification of texts" or maybe it is too much so, this is because the list was never supposed to be considered as a genre of poetry, but because it was a poetry class it was judged as so. In other words, because Fish’s students focused on the list as being a poem they overlooked the fact that maybe it was simply a list and therefore were only able to place it as such because of "genre".
This can be found in everyday life, but maybe not so much as when one goes to school. Because students are presented with materials and told exactly what the information is conveying, the student then apply those ideas on anything new they encounter. Restricting a novel as literature, and history as simple facts, although the categorizing of such things makes them easier to understand. They lose sight that a novel although fiction, could have just as much historical value then a textbook, or a textbook be written in such a way it is fiction.