Eagelton, Chandler, and Fish

While reading the work of Fish, in "How to Recognize a Poem when you see one" I was beginning to somewhat connect his way of approach of writing to that of what we have already been talking about in class using Chandler. Like Chandler, Fish seems to have the same ideas about genre. He says that we cannot place a barrier on a genre and what that genre brings out. He had also said that genre is what the audience make it out to be. I found that even Fish said something similar in that we have a reader who gets a text and from their own knowledge they can say weather they know the text to be a poem or not. He says that "Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable text nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities and for the texts those activities produce." When reading Fish's article I was thinking it as in terms of how a poem is written and how we are used to seeing poems. We always think that poems are rhyming, funny or dramatic, but what we learn later on is that a poem can be written in any way, you can have a narrative poem, a dialogue poem, even a blank verse poem. Knowing the wide variety of genres of poems and other texts helps us in understanding and analyzing the poem. The way the poem falls together depends on its genre and when we have learnt the genre we can easily interpret it.
Eagleton, in her piece on talks of the different writer and their works. She says that the good writers are always put in the "good" category while the "bad" in the bad category. She says that each writer has their own views of writing and should be allowed to write in their own way and that they shouldn't be criticized for their work. She claims that works are done in a certain time frame and that as time advances so does the writings and the understanding of readers. Meaning that if a writer of the Western genre wrote books of 1920's compared to what a western movie of 2009 there might be a significant amount of difference in the text because of the time differences. We don't have the same corny old sheriffs, or the same use of words . She backs her words by saying that " Our Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle ages." By this she is trying to say that the writings of the middle age Homer wouldn't be the same writings of the Homer of the 21st century and that is simply due to the fact that the timing of the writers have changed and this can go back to what we have been taking about in class with Chandler because he too said that the understanding of genre depends on the understanding of its readers and the time frame of when it was written.