Post-Genre

I’m beginning to believe that post-print fiction is inherently grounded in a total disruption of conventional ideas of genre. I’ve been tempted to look at my concentration in poetry and my boyfriend’s film major and think “wow, what a total waste of time.” If I’ve spent the last few years of studies learning what poetry is and how to read it, Jason Nelson and other post-print authors have begged me to throw all of it out. They’ve shown me that it only inhibits my ability to read.

What most of the texts from our class have in common is their inability to conform to a genre convention. Is interactive fiction textual literature, or is it a game? Is The Whale Hunt photography, a database, or a story? Even House of Leaves made us teeter between looking at poetry, film, academic writing, music, and photography. Jason Nelson tries to posit some of his art as “games,” but it’s really just an art exhibit explored through a generic platformer rather than through your own feet. If I try to read it as a game, I don’t understand. If I try to read it as poetry, I don’t understand. If I try to view it as graphic art, I feel like I’m missing out on half of what is there. Is it possible to read multiple genres at one time within one text, keeping the assumptions of Rabinowitz’s Rules for Reading? The rules–assumptions–that we keep in mind as we explore a text are inseparable from genre convention. Genre convention, in other words, sets the rules. What we notice depends on what we’ve been told to notice based on our experience with the genre before, and what genre we categorize the text to be.

I think what it boils down to is that the internet and computers makes it so remarkably easy to mash genres together. All it takes is a little programming. It’s impossible to expect artists not to experiment with this exciting new ability, and it reminds me of one of the most recent genres to develop it’s own conventions–film. For a long time, viewers, academics, and filmmakers alike struggled with positing film outside of the worlds of photography and theater. These were the genre conventions that people knew, but seeing film as one or the other limited the full capabilities of the technology’s impact on art. There’s been an equally remarkable transition with the genre of video games; while critical engagements with video games often rely heavily on knowledge of film studies, “video game studies” itself is trying to break away from this. While I explore Jason Nelson’s art, I can look at it with all of my knowledge of genre conventions from poetry, film, and games. But I feel like this is limiting my experience with the text–and undermining Nelson’s project as an artist.

However, instead of inventing a “new genre” for works like Nelson’s with it’s own rules for reading, I wonder if it’s possible for human understanding of texts to ever move post-genre. This maneuver seems so counter-intuitive to our abilities to “read” art, but I feel like the genres themselves are also perpetually limiting. As Nelson writes in The Bomar Gene, “Humans cannot stop creating.” We can’t stop breaking the conventions. Can we stop relying on them as a crutch when we read, or will we always need them, and simultaneously be eluded because of them when we approach texts like the ones we’ve seen in this class?