Michelle Spera Connecting Genres

In Fish's artticle, "How to Recognize a Poem When you See One", one of the first ways you can tell if it is a poem is if you go into a reading already knowing that what you are about to read is a poem. Fish's students were told that they had a poetry assignment and so they immediately knew to look for symbols and common characteristics they had been taught to look for. Poetry has certain elements to be aware of and once you understand that you have a poem in front of you, you know to look for these elements. " As soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess." (Fish) This idea relates to the ideas of Chnadler's ideas of genre because genre dictates what is expected by the reader/viewer. If the genre is already known, the reader will have prior knowledge to what that movie/book will be about based on what they have been taught to expect.

Poems and genres are seen in a particular way that allows for comfort and expectation. We dictate certain meaning to types of genres that allow us to have this expectation. However, the meaning we assign to these things may not always be correct. Saussurean points out in his theory, the idea of language. We assign meaning to symbols and create a particular language, although this concept is strictly relative. Since there are so many different languages being spoken, the fact that a certain group gives a meaning to a signifier that no other language will understand makes the signified irrelevant. Language is a very important part of literary study and how we understand many genres. For example, Fish points out that because a piece of writing is deemed a "poem", there must be distinguished language. This concept does not hold that stongly because of the fact that language is so relative. A meaning behind a poem may vary greatly depending on the language it is written and the connotation the words have.

Meaning and definition we attribute to things is very important as well as unique to our culture. In Fish's article, he suggested that if a person walked into his class and saw a student with a raised hand, he might think him ill. However, because of the specific role we have assigned to students, this is far from abnormal. We judge the definititon of something by using signifiers and the signified, but because cultures allow for the different cuttings of the world ((Rice and Waugh, 16) it differs among people and those unfamiliar with the culture. Fish calims that we know the definition of something by how it acts and the fact we know what it is. By knowing a poem is just that, we can begin to attribute to it certain qualities that we know are common to that of poems; just as we can do with other types of genre as well as something as common as a student.