More Theories

For as long as I know we have been studying genre in our class all the time and the more that we study it and read other peoples thoughts we start to understand it more. All of the readings that we have done relates to one another, like Chandler and the whole Genre theory. When you put a piece of work into a genre, you look at it differently and you expect different things. Stanley Fish’s experiment with the list of authors proves this to be true because when he tells his students “what they saw on the blackboard was a religious poem of the kind they had been studying” their perspective changed. They started to analyze the list as if it really was a poem, they used their prior knowledge of how to understand poem and they deciphered it. Fish also states that “it was the act of recognition that came first--they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem-- and the distinguishing features then followed.”

So before he told his students that it was a religious poem it was just a list, kind of like what Chandler is getting at. When you know the genre of something you look for and expect certain things because in Fish’s first class the list of names was just a list of names. There is a part in Modern Literary Theory that relates to this on page 15 the last paragraph, “Language is a system of signs, the sign being the basic unit of meaning. The sign compromises a signifier and signified, the signifier is the ‘word image’ (Visual or acoustic) and the signified the ‘mental concept’. From what I understand, he is saying that once you see or hear a word you get a mental concept. So when you hear Western you think cowboys, shoot-outs, etc. The same applies to the word War Story.

As for the example drawn from life where social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction I couldn’t really think of a good one but I liked Jennifer’s example about the whole dating issue since most people can relate to it. Sometimes hanging out with someone of the opposite sex is just hanging out; it doesn’t necessarily have to be a date of whatever. The word “date” is such a cliché there are so many things that people can do and it will be considered dating but that isn’t always the case.