Cinnabar and Alabaster

the major analogies (1-2):
1. biology (evolution)
2. families (trait-sharing & close or distant related-ness)
3. institutionality: "social institutions, like literary genres, provide a netowrk of normal through which our experience is made culturally meaningful"
4. speech-acts (a direct analogy, wherein genres are written "imitations or representations of speech acts"--but this doesn't work for all genres)

the overall argument is for "a pluralistic approach to genre theory.... a given theoretical model may be highly relevant to some kinds of genres, or to some aspects of their evolution, but only partially relevant or even totally irrelevant to other genres or other problems in the field. note that this pluralistic view is not a relativistic one, because not every conceptual analogy is relevant to the same degree (or even necessariily relevant at all) to genre theory"

his definition (8-10): genre is "a combination of prototypical, representative members, and a flexible set of constitutive rules that apply to some levels of literary texts, to some individual writers, usually to more than one literary period, and to more than one language or culture" <--this def should "distinguish genre from certain other types of groupings of literature" and "apply to all existing (and future) 'historical genres'" where "historical genre" means "they are transmitted through history," "are concrete configurations of texts in specific periods and literatures," and "they actually shape how writers produce, and readers respond to,literary works."

11. "there are no stable paradigms of genres, because if the critic's purposes shift, so do his 'generic' groupings of works"
12. "in every generic category we witness an intimate, hermeneutical relation between paradigmatic instances and the associated rules: generic rules are drawn from, and exemplified by, those representative cases. to cut this gordian knot connecting prototypical members and the associated generic rules would result either in disregarding the stable, paradigmatic instances, or else in denying that authors and readers (consciously or unconsciously) draw from those instances a flexible set of generic rules"
15. "although i do not propose to determine how many authors should write within a generic framework, there is no doubt that a genre cannot remain an individual endeavor. no matter how important a specific writer is in a given generic tradition, he is always only a part of that tradition."
17. "in...cases where the very channels of intercultural and interlingual communication are blocked, the generic system will remain confined within its linguistic boundaries. however, this situation in its pure form seems to be the exception in literary history; interlingual and intercultural contacts are the noem. where such contacts occur, literary genres commonly migrate across the borders and establish 'colonies' in neighboring countries or languages"
89. an important note about convention: "it does not entail...any actual conformity to the convention. in other words, a convention is not primarily based on statistical grounds; people may rebel against prevailing conventions or ignore them, yet we can still speak of those prevailing conventions as long as people believe that some specific 'oughtness' is part of the cultural scene in which they operate."