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Week 2--The Power of Genre
Last week, we read Freadman's description of genre as a game of tennis; this week, we're listening to Rosmarin's description of genre as a deductive tool. What sense can you make of her emphasis on the relationship between the particular and the general? How reliably do you think can we move from one to the other? What intrigued you in the various games we played in class, moving from individual examples (of our idiosyncratic eating habits, of particular poems, of literary terms) to universal categories and back again? And (or) what's your response to her claim that genre is "the most powerful explanatory tool" because it has the "power to make the reader better than [s]he was"?