12 February 2013 - genre

One day James Joyce happened to be deconstructing genre and asked, “Is a chair finely made tragic or comic?” Well, but that’s like asking whether a Marx Brothers movie is tragic or comic; it depends on the context. Today we take a more sophisticated view of genre. We know that genres are like paint in umpteen different primary colors and that a painting is not a color, it is a pattern of colors.