# 3

After reading Terry Eagleton’s essay on ‘Literature’ and Stanly Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” it became eminent in my head that there lies some sort of a parallel connection between Daniel Chandler’s Theory on genre, and our class discussions on the subject of genre.
Hitherto, I am convinced on notion put forward by Eagleton that “we share certain ‘deep’ ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social life, and which could not be changed without transforming that [social] life”(404). It becomes very important to understand that this external stimuli given off by our society shapes or predicts our internal cognitive faculties. This influence by society is unmistakable clear in Chandler’s genre theory. Chandler states that “a genre defines a moral and social world. Indeed, a genre is any medium that can be seen as embodying certain values and ideological assumption.”
A great example to clarify Chandler and Eagleton’s argument is to introduce the works of Stanly Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”. In this work, he conducts an experiment on his second class. These students are “confined to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century” (p, 1), who are given an assignment to somehow dismantle a poem, which consists of random names of Professors. He then made an effort to circle or box out the assignment, making it allegedly more clear to the students, stating that it is a ‘religious poem’. The students collectively made an effort to make something out of nothing, such knowledge that has been taught down to them by their previous instructors. Fish argues that it is their background knowledge of the “academic world” that led them to such actions. He elaborates, “…our tacit knowledge of what it means to move around in academic life was acquired so gradually and so long ago that it doesn’t seem like knowledge at all but a part of the world.” He adds “...your walking is informed by an internalized awareness of institutional goals and practices, of norms of behavior, of lists of do’s and don’ts, of visible lines and the dangers of crossing them; and, as a result, you see everything as already organized in relation to those same goals and practices” (p, 4).
The works of Chandler, Fish, and Eagleton are individually and collectively significant as they pertain to out class discussions on genre. Before reading Abotts’s “The Purpose of the Creature Man”, I read the assignment for class; ‘Find details and moments (scenes) with the story which clearly define the story as a ‘western.’” With this knowledge, my cognitive faculties would only trigger information as a ‘western’, especially my present knowledge of a ‘western’ genre. That only leads me to my own perception of a ‘western’, without knowing the epistemology of a ‘western’. Even till today, we as a class are striving for a better understanding of what it means for a work to be classified as a ‘western’, or a non ‘western’.
Attending the funeral of your fathers friend’s employee, where the cops never actually discovered the body, who has also been missing after his boat has sank in Rockaway, Queens would demonstrate a similar social scenario with Fish, and his students. You don’t have the slightest idea who your fathers friend’s employee is or what he looks like. You cannot really feel sorry for him because no one really knows what it feels like to be dead. So what should one do at a funeral? Don’t worry! Our society has prepared us, spiritually and emotionally. We know that that it’s perfectly legal to cry, and recommended to dress in black (where did we get that idea?), and say our goodbyes.