Fishing for Eagleton and Chandler

In regards to what we have discussed in class thus far..Fish, Eagleton and Chandler all correlate with the problem of genre and definition. Fish discusses interpretation in How to Recognize a Poem much like how Eagleton does regarding literature and Chandler does regarding genre itself. Fish relates to genre in discussing on how his students recognize a poem. Although this "poem" was just an assignment for the previous class, since he told his students it was a poem they identify the "poem" and analyze the poem the way they were trained to. Fish states, "It was almost as if they were following a recipe--if it's a poem do this, if it's a poem, see it that way--and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes" They were trained to be able to point out certain elements in a work that would indentify it as being of the poetic genre. Eagleton discusses genre and relates it to a much broader scale: literature itself and how we value literature as being good or bad or not considered literature at all.

Fish's discussion of the problem presented to his class about their poem ties into what we first read in Chandler's Introduction to Genre Theory where he states, "Conventional definitions of genres tend to be based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions of content (such as themes or settings) and/or form (including structure and style) which are shared by the texts which are regarded as belonging to them." Much like how Fish states how his students were able to draw the conclusions they did about their "poem" assignment; it is because they were looking at the "poem" with a pre-existing knowledge of how a poem should look or sound.

In Eagleton's excerpt from the class text he plays with the problem of definition in terms of what is fact and what are valued-opinions. To say a piece of literature is good is of course a matter of opinion but what is interesting is when he gives examples of Lamb, Macaulay and Mill as "fine writing" while Bentham, Marx and Darwin are not. He states, "This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue...but it has the disadvantage of sufggesting that by and large people term 'literature' writing which they think is good. An obvious objection to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as 'bad literature'." It correlates to the problem of definition that Chandler introduces because using opinion to define genre, or what something is in general does not make it factual.

A real-life social interaction similar to Fish's example would be watching football. Even if people know its a sport without prior knowledge, they would have no idea what is going on or why certain calls are made or what. It kind of reminds me of the movie Coming to America with Eddie Murphy. He is trying to get on the good side of the father of the girl he is pursuing and tries to discuss football with him. Murphy's character being from Africa has no idea how football is played and tries to describe the game to the father. I can't remember word for word but it ends with him saying something like 'they won by kicking an oblong ball made of pigskin through a giant H.' Without prior knowledge of the rules and goals of the game one would not understand why people are cheering or booing or anything that is taking place in the game.