| Sumario: | By foregrounding genre as an analytic for a sociology of post-1945 publishing, recent scholars seem to be playing catch-up with the industry; we are coming late to a party in which publishers and content distributors have already named the genres we study. Our scholarly lag allows us to research how capitalism shapes creative production, but it makes it harder for our study to disrupt the categories of creative production that markets have systematized for us. As an alternative, this essay recovers an approach to genre modeled by the midcentury neo-Aristotelian critics associated with the University of Chicago. The Chicago Critics were once the main rival of the New Critics, but it was the latter who won that struggle, and today it is only the latter we typically remember. This is a shame because, I argue, the skill of close reading we associate with the New Critics is logically incoherent without the skill of taxonomy presented by the Chicago Critics and their focus on genre. In particular, they bring out the importance of "hypothetical genres": categories we have not yet named but are prompted to explore by the logic of the taxonomy we have begun.
|
|---|