This supports the ‘fluidity’ theory discussed in the post.

As an exercise in taxonomy, it may be useful to introduce tags (the web 2.0 trope) into the discussion. See how a group of people/readers/students would tag a sample of literary works.

Then look at the subsets that are created, and discuss your findings. I’m very interested with what comes up in terms of actual sets and their contents and the insights from the exercise.

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There is variance with how tags mean from one person to another, but put that aside for now and let that be surfaced in the discussion after the experiment proper.

I’ve heard it mentioned that books are an intellectual’s trophy case. My own library is haphazardly arranged, but I can imagine how much fun it can be cataloging one’s own collection physically, and how looking at the spaces and ratios on the shelves may actually influence book-purchasing behaviors.

I told her that’s a common answer, but it points out that people still *want* to go to different parts of the store; which means people want different things; which continues to beg the question: how are these things significantly different and what gives them varied appeal? So ultimately it still comes back to a philosophical question of what marks each genre as different.

Genre in this perspective, is a virtuous thing and is of interest as a field of study.

I certainly am more interested in a wider readership/participant base for this discussion.

You make a lot of sense when you say everyone wants it to be different things. I think that comes from wanting genre (or one particular genre) to be *something*, which isn’t strictly necessary. I’ve been struggling to articulate an idea recently, that a work has genre markers in it — in the same way SF is said to have “distance markers.” There can be all sorts pulled from different places, like the detective story, horror, fantasy, what have you. I think one of the risks I run there, though, is quantification, claiming that more markers make a story more of one thing or another.

I’ve often heard it said of genres that the only real use they are is to tell readers where the books are in the store (or movies, or whatever). I wonder if, extending that comparison, what draws a reader into certain sections of the store is the reaction engendered by the particular genre, and how to discover what that is.

I have no idea if I’m making sense, I’m up way too early so I can go teach freshman comp.

I think the problem with genre is that everyone wants it to be different things so they can hang different ideas on it. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it does tend to obscure what genre actually is. But then, no-one really knows how to define science fiction, most definitions end up being catalogues of devices (it’s got a robot in it, so it must be science fiction), but that will not allow us any insight into what is actually being done within genre.

I think that is the broader point that Delany was trying to make also: everyone has their own private definition of science fiction, but that is in many ways irrelevant. What is important is how the reader responds to the genre, how it changes their view of other literatures and of the world. This issue is not something that is limited to science fiction, or even to genre, but it is one of the important issues surrounding how (and, indeed, why) we read.

I may need to take one more theory course in the next few years; I might just take one for the fun of it.