Categorization:

the critic's job as an excellent and learned reader:

provides the artist with information about the work of audiences (at least of the the "critic" type):

Categorization creates genre:

creating a genre identifies and creates habits of mind:

ways of reading, thinking, interpreting based on conventions, variables, and anomalies:

genre provides context for readers to enter into new work:

genre provides readers with the possibility of seeing meaning where convention allows it to be realized and to see difference where genre is violated or tranformed:

genre definition allows artists to see their work from outside themselves and ultimately as connected to a body of works and genres:

this perspective provides the mode for transformation, the possibility of perceiving how genre, and therefore particular works, participate in conventions of mind, behavior, and politics:

genre is no more real than the works it encompasses:

the work of a critic is no less creative or valid than the work of any other reader:

the critic is limited by her disciplinary conventions (genres) just like artists/other readers:

generally, critics seek the possibility of objective reading by linking form with content with cultural.social import:

they seek a reduction or elimination of subjective response:

an art form is productive and meaningful and viable insofar as it produces genres, then maintains some while destroying, transforming others over time:

the flux of genres balanced by a maintenance of old forms links the present to the past::

FORM:: Content

Objective::Subjective

Material::immaterial

Body::Mind

Form::idea

The Book As Form and Idea

As Form:

As Idea: