Have you ever tried to be different? To be special? In telling the stories of our own lives, one is expected to say something worth hearing, or that has some substantial social value to contribute. Within our class discussions, Professor McNeill brought up the idea that many life narratives are personal accounts grappling with identity, informed by certain cultural scripts, imparting enlightenment, or depicting exemplary lives. It is as if being a person is not quite enough, but one must find a niche within the lives of everyday people to tell a life narrative that is truly compelling.
In spite of this quest for originality, the rise of genres has helped to understand life narratives, due to genres functioning as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller 159). This loose amalgamation of what sub-genres within the life narrative genre can be about threatens the originality pursued by writers in telling their stories. With this in mind, the rejection of genre and category by several life narrative authors brings to mind whether this is a compelling argument for a change in genre, or if this is more of a paratextual marketing ploy to differentiate their text as unique and original.
Fred Wah uses the biotext genre to resist how he will be read by others, learning about his own story with the same pace (and process) as the reader. However, this redefinition of the genre is compelling as this does not bring more space or a new opening for life narratives necessarily, but it gives Fred Wah a foot of originality to stand within in to convey his book as a story of mixed-race identity through biotext instead of just another life story. With multiple overlapping stories, subjects, and truths, the use of biotext is very connected with other issues at play as well, such as communal memory.
Art Spiegelman speaks on genre as well in MetaMaus, explaining that comics are a medium and not a genre. In this way, comics act as a medium to deliver genres, such as Westerns or romance (170). Though Spiegelman’s argument clearly functions in favour of his own medium of delivery for Maus, his rejection of comics as a genre also functions as an attempted restructuring of societal expectations upon comics to give Maus a comparatively unique origin.
With the genre-rejection strategies of Wah and Spiegelman in mind, the rise of genres brings problems for the typical life narrative writer, with the fear of being amalgamated into a genre playing a large role in how his/her text will be received. In this way, genre-rejection may not necessarily be a strategic move for a discursive niche, but simply a method of painting originality across a text within the life narratives genre, giving that text a better chance at market.
Bold claim James – I like it! I find your argument of “genre-rejection” as a mere marketing ploy to be quite convincing especially in the age of commercialization and commodification. In addition, the sheer immensity with which life narrative writing has become more accessible means differentiating texts as unique is a growing challenge. However, it is this “genre-rejection” that contributes to the challenge – more books are marketed as defying genre and therefore, upcoming ones must find even more extreme rejections.
However, it might be that the categorization of “genre” is becoming more and more obsolete. The “genre-rejection” can be a signal to the restrictive labels of “life narrative” and their definitions where it is difficult to distinguish between a medium and a genre. Perhaps moving towards a genre-free textual presentation and categorization is the way in which we can begin to interact with texts objectively and freely.
Hey James, I enjoyed your comments on ‘genre-rejection’ and I find it interested how categorizing life narratives into genres inevitably brings up similarities to fiction. I can see how it would be frustrating to the writer of a life narrative to have his or her work pigeonholed into a specific genre because to an extent that draws away from the realism of it. From what I know of him from class, Spiegelman had concerns about this, about how the more abstract medium of comic books might degrade the holocaust into a fiction. To be fair though, Spiegelman was a comic book artist first and foremost and is only using the medium he knows best to share his father’s story.