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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2251133" data-attributes="member: 6533">I can't tell you how much I'd love to pursue this conversation further, but I can't help feeling that too much further will take us beyond the area where this helps to explore the issue at hand.  Suffice to say that were we to have this conversation, I would argue that genre in fact predicates writing and that you can't, in fact, read a work without an idea of the genre involved.  Hopefully, if you don't know the genre from somplace else the work or the context you are reading or seeing it in will teach it to you, but if you don't learn the genre or figure it out then you will never get the work in question and, on a very basic level, you will fail to produce the work in question whether as a reader or a writer.  You mention that a lot of kids go into Shakespeare with no knowledge of the genre, but of those who come out of it will there be any who actually got or enjoyed the works in question who won't have learned something about the basic genre mechanics of the tragedian form?I'm not saying that you have to have a perfect understanding or that your reading of an individual work will not outstrip or underperform in terms of your understanding of the genre, but that there is an essential correlation between your ability to read a thing and your capacity for understanding its genre.  This is most apparent when it comes to technical writing such as manuals, the infamous disconnect between the American consumer and the VCR instruction manual comes to mind, but I think it's also very apparent in RPGs as well where the knowledge and understanding of genre function to guide the player and GM in their double roles as readers and writers.  It's probably why I find this subject so fascinating.</blockquote>

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