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M. Gallagher's picture

Week One

Well, since we went over the first image in a bit of detail in class, I'll just write my reactions to the second image (in a sort of telegraph/note structure).

Image two: surrreal. Rather stark Dali-esque figures. The hand is a hill flipping the pages of a book, which sprout the growth of colorful flowers and butterflies; it's somewhat trite to have books representing knowledge which represent growth. Ladder to hand impling that it's an aid to this gain of knowledge? Farmers/other (uneducated) figures toiling (the fields) with a barren tree as their sole companion.

 

Anne Freadman's metaphor/allegory/simile that genre is a game of tennis seemed a bit bulky to me. It ended up working alright, but it seems to have confused the matter by adding yet another layer of abstraction. The best part I noticed was when she talked about how genre should be defined by a system of contrasts rather than the inherent nature of the work. This tied into the idea of an "ideal form" for a genre. Thus, there could be an archetype (or, perhaps more accurately, a holotype) for a genre that would obey all of the contrast rules, while the rest of the texts might just obey the majority of them; the fewer contrast rules obeyed, the more divergent from the holotype (and thus genre) that specific text would be.

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