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I am currently taking a Psychology class, where we have just finished a series of lectures on how our brains classify certain forms. According to Psychology and Neurobiology, the question isn’t whether we are going to classify form, (that we cannot help), but how such classification is made. It strikes me that even with our current technologies, and the amount of time we have devoted, there still doesn’t even seem to be agreement about how it is we process, and classify a simple square.

I feel like that is like what went on in Rosmarin’s essay. She listed various theories in order to show that the conflict within genre theory seems to be how to classify many things that aren’t the same. Yes, we see the square, but do we recognize the shape itself, combine individual lines, ect. For me, the most useful thing her argument pointed out was that genre as metaphor could resolve this conflict. By saying something is like something else it implies not only the similar aspects of the two, but also that they must have distinctive qualities. Similarly reversing the process, saying something is not like something else can lead to a deeper appreciation of what both of them are.

Perhaps if we allowed ourselves to utilize this same theory in other aspects of classifications we could open a few more doors.