The context phallacy, does genre do a story justice?

The more we explore the value of context as a tool for literary analysis the more evident the duality of its nature becomes. With seemingly innocent intentions we tend to embrace context as an aid for classification, classification being a way in which we can understand a story better.
If we know to which group a particular story belongs we can then digest the story equipped with the themes, props, characters, and overall criteria that necessitate a successful story of that genre. A well defined genre brings with it certain value standards that are either met or failed and subsequently judge the value of a work of prose. However, there is danger here as well. Much like an attorney leading a witness the inclusion consequence of a context recognized can severely limit our ability to understand a work. It places restraints and can unnecessarily bias the reader much the same way the students in Fish’s class were already dedicated to explicate a mere list of names as a poem simply because it was presented as a poem. “In other words, acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”
This phenomenon can be observed socially as well because many social situations bring with them expectations that we are sometimes helpless to obey. For example, if we were to go to a comedy club and witness a performer delivering material of a decidedly mediocre nature we would be much more likely to laugh then if the same mediocre comic material were presented to us by the person in front of us on line at the bank. Social expectations and social moray’s are constantly influencing the way we decode information and especially the way we respond to it. “With this reservation, the suggestion that ‘literature’ is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop the once and for all the illusion that the category ‘literature’ is ‘objective’ in the sense of being eternally given and immutable.”