#genrereport

I just completed my final compilation of work for Unit 2. It included a genre report in which we explain and answer questions about a certain genre, a contra-genre review in which we look at a piece of literature as if it was a different genre, and lastly an accompanying essay in which we analyze the concept of genre as a whole and tie it back to Chandler, Clark, Ruthven, Holt, and O’Brien. I chose the genre of satire. The genre report was pretty easy but it did require a bit of prior research, which helped me to better understand the working definition and limits of genre For my contra-genre review, I critiqued the children’s book The Rainbow Fish by Mark Pfister as if it were a satire on communism. This was actually kind of fun because it gave me a chance to be creative. I played around with the formatting and images to make it look like it was written as a book review for the blog The Huffington Post. The comparison between Rainbow Fish, the generous fish who evenly distributed all of his special scales to his underwater community, and a communistic government, was actually way easier than I expected…and the obviousness of the parallels and symbolism that I found was pretty crazy. Additionally, it surprised me how easily on genre can be interpreted as a different one, and how this difference in perspective can change the meaning of the literature entirely. Because of this, the contra-genre review blurred the lines between genres and made me confused once again. Ugh. Moving on, I worked on the less creative portion of the unit—the accompanying essay. Here I talked about genre as a whole and referenced the Chandler, Clark, Ruthven, Holt and O’Brien readings. I come to the conclusion that nobody can come to a consensus on genre because its characteristics and qualifications depend on the perspective of the reader. Essentially, genre can be whatever you want it to be. I explain this thought further in my essay when I state, “although society yearns to neatly label everything, language and literature are facets that cannot be pinned down. Categorization of writing is ever-changing and always subjective. It is the responsibility of each individual person to question and reflect on a text’s genre for themselves, if they even chose to do so at all.” I am getting more frustrated because nothing in literature seems to be set in stone at all. Even the differences between genre and medium are so minute and specific that sometimes I find the two indistinguishable. Although this unit was interesting, after all that work I feel like I’ve reached the same conclusion as last time—that everything just depends on perspective.