On Fiction
From WebGenreWiki
On Fiction
There is no doubt that weeding out fiction from non-fiction would be beneficial, but I doubt that categorisations of fiction could be accomplished by similar feature sets as for non-fiction. Please object if anyone knows more about this. As I suggested, artful fiction mostly have the purpose of being innovative (and non-conventional) with respect to e.g. form, whereas non-fiction usually has to stick to conventions. Artful fiction often plays with breaking conventional rules. Print-based modern literature is full of examples where categorization is very cumbersome. What about Rimbaud's 'une saison en enfer' and Lautréamont's 'les chants de Maldoror'? On the surface it is prose, but I would say poetry. A lot of old drama texts have been said to have been written to be read only, and not to be performed. But the form is similar in both cases. What about Queneau's 'Cent mille milliards de poèmes' and modern experiments on kinetic poetry on the web? In addition, what people recognize as literary genres has little in common with non-fictional genres. Crime novels, romance, thrillers, westerns etc are labelled genres, but what distinguishes some of these "genres" are to be found beyond the form of expression.
Wikipedia has an illustrative picture: "A simple example of the inherent meaning in an art form is that of a western movie where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one dons a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the "western" genre, it is clear to the informed audience that they are watching a gunfight showdown between a good guy and a bad guy." Here, what matters is the depicted situation. The Western genre (whether as moving pucture or as text) is recognized from the mapping of the depicted situation to the viewer's experience of previous similar situations --- but this similarity is not primarily about form, but about what can be discerned by a human mind beyond the expression.
In the article category of MeyerZuEissen we find [1]. On the surface it really seems to be fiction, but if the intended purpose is considered and to what use this narrative fragment is likely to come, we are probably likely not to treat it as fiction.
But anyhow, it all comes down to what we want to accomplish. The division between fiction and non-fiction is likely to come first, and then we have to consider if both "text groups" (in the sense of Werlich) should be processed.
The strongest argument against attempting fiction-genre classification is really a poststructuralist one (in the line of the thinkings of Todorov --- and Derrida). Pp. 36-38 (Swales, J M. 1990. Genre Analysis.) recapitulates these thinkings in a concise way.
