Response 3

The central theme I noticed in our readings of Chandler, Fish and Eagelton is that we can not be sure if the conventions of a genre make the genre recognizable or if the genre itself makes the conventions recognizable. What Eagelton is showing us in his essay about literature is that to most, something is not considered literature till it is classified as such, and there is no standard for what counts as literature because there are no universal properties which make a work literature. “Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist.” Anything can be considered literature. Literature is not objective, it is to be read in many contexts and understood in many different ways. Similarly what Fish does with the anecdote about his classes different interpretations of the same grouping of words is illustrate that once a reader is told in which way they should read a text, that reader will find what needs to be found in order to understand it in the approproate lens. The class that was looking for Christian poetry found Christian poetry in a simple list of names. As Fish says, “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.” Once the reader is made aware of what to look for, they will almost certainly see it and this is what makes identifying film and literature by genre difficult, or as Chandler would say, problematic to define.