When we interrogate a concept like genre, there are advantages to beginning with the way we use the word in the common language. In reading a text, we “identify” or “recognize” a genre. If we attempt to define or describe a genre as such, we are engaging in an entirely different order of activity, one remarkably close to legislation or border control. To identify something assumes a paradigm with a limited set of choices. We may identify a given text differently as a “novel,” a “realist novel,” a “pastoral”; we may debate whether a work is a “novel” or a “prose romance”; but in each case we presume sets of categories on various levels of specificity, whether we deploy particular categories to confirm or surprise common expectations in our identification.
