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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 3885975" data-attributes="member: 2205">What?  Based on that small list of completely nondescript "clues?"I should think not.It's your holding yourself out there as the standard by which the genre should be defined that I'm not accepting, and not to put words into Hussar's mouth, but it seems clear to me that he's also not accepting "it's this way because I say so, and I have a literature degree, so if you don't you don't have any business talking to me!" approach you're taking.  Why is this so difficult for you to understand?Reading between the lines, it sounds like Hussar does know from literary criticism but simply isn't the kind of person who jumps in and tries to flout their credentials in an attempt to shut down discussion.In any case, not to speak for Hussar, but I find the whole discussion extremely tiresome.  I don't have a literary background, although certainly I took enough literature classes in college since my degree was in a liberal arts category and they were pretty much required electives (plus I enjoyed them).  And every literature professer I ever had took an attitude similar to Hussar's genres don't exist as Platonic (note, for the obtuse, speaking of a Platonic ideal does not mean that Plato himself literally defined literary genres; it's a metaphor) ideals.  They don't exist until someone comes along and carves out their territory, and other works cluster close to it due to similarity, and then you get a kind of literary zeitgeist and the genre is born.  You don't go back and retroactively add earlier works that have some similarities into the genre.Unless the world of literary criticism has completely changed since I was in college 15 years or so ago, your definition and usage of genre is completely inconsistent with everything I've ever heard on the subject.I also absolutely do not accept that genre is a term that the literary criticism camp have claimed as their turf.  You may wish to create a dichotomy between genre and category and try to force people coming at the question from another standpoint into the label ghetto, so to speak, but that's a pretty weak argument.Looking at things from a purely pragmatic and practical standpoint, book publishers on the whole have a lot more to say about what "genre" is than all the literature majors in the world.</blockquote>

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