MIGHT ELECTRONIC MUSIC—A MAJOR FORCE BEHIND CHANGES IN ACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGY, COPYRIGHT LAW, HUMAN-MACHINE INTERface, artistic production, marketing and consumption practices, and global connectivity—help us think about the dizzying proliferation of today's written forms and how we talk about them? It can certainly offer new models and a rich vocabulary for speaking about such things as labeling, canon, and the relationship between author and audience. As “text” continues to bloat, shrink, scatter, and blur, thanks in part to the same digital tools used by contemporary e-music, perhaps looking at how this sound swarm is dealing with its identity will be useful to those who read, write, and write about literature. The essay that follows invites literary scholars to “listen awry” to a wildly polyvalent, indeterminate musical complex that simultaneously lobbies for, rejects, and eludes categorization.

If you had typed genre into amazon.com's search engine on a certain day in March 2007, you would have come up with an initial ten listings that included two gay men's magazines (Genre and Instinct Magazine), one introductory theoretical text (my own Genre), a compact disc by a group called D-Genre, a composition textbook (Tom Romano's Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers), three resource kits for children (Carson-Dellosa's Literary Genres, Susan Ludwig's Twenty-Four Ready-to-Go Genre Book Reports: Engaging Activities with Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need to Help Students Get the Most Out of Their Independent Reading, and a bulletin-board set entitled BB Set Genres of Lit), and, finally, two school textbooks (Tara McCarthy's Teaching Genre (Grades 4–8) and Heather Lattimer's Thinking through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshops 4–12).

No concept is more fundamental to literary study than genre. It is virtually impossible to think seriously about literature without considering the codes or conventions that structure literary texts. Aristotle's distinction between the “poetic kinds” of epic and drama and Horace's insistence on poetic decorum are early attempts to distinguish among types of creative expression in order to understand and appreciate the specific excellences of each. The most enduring typology of genres divides literature into three classes, depending on who speaks in and therefore controls the work. As M. H. Abrams represents these distinctions, they consist of “lyric (uttered throughout in the first person), epic or narrative (in which the narrator speaks in the first person, then lets his characters speak for themselves); and drama (in which the characters do all the talking).” Other divisions have been proposed (e.g., Northrop Frye's division of comedy, tragedy, irony, and satire), as have more nuanced accounts of genre itself that focus on how genres can cross, mix, and stretch to include deviations from type. But as a means of imposing a preliminary principle of order on an immense and various field, genre is an indispensable concept.

Why should we care about genre?

Following a hint from Wai Chee Dimock, let us perform a conceptual experiment. Imagine that literature departments were to begin hiring faculty members primarily by their expertise in particular genres instead of (as is usually the case in the larger departments) primarily by their expertise in particular historical periods. Literary study, I hope you will agree, would very soon cease to exist in its present form. This prospect exposes something about literary study in its present form that might after all prove unworthy of being mourned, which is to say of being preserved.