synchronicity, genre
In the midst of interesting discussions of genre, including but not limited to fantasy, on Making Light and on
papersky's journal, I just sent a coworker email stating that if we're going to treat "Mythology" as a separate genre from "Folk Tales, Tall Tales, and Fables" in our "Index by Genre," we're going to have to address which side of the line a lot of stories fall on. We can't just pull out the Arachne story as Mythology and leave everything else alone.
It doesn't help, for these purposes, that every reading in these anthologies must be listed exactly once in the index by genre. I don't know whether it helps or hinders that, for these purposes, "poetry," "songs," and "plays" are all being treated as genres, so we don't have to address whether a given play is historical fact, historical fiction, contemporary fact [for a sixth-grade audience in 2006 or after, is Samantha Smith's letter to Andropov history?]/
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It doesn't help, for these purposes, that every reading in these anthologies must be listed exactly once in the index by genre. I don't know whether it helps or hinders that, for these purposes, "poetry," "songs," and "plays" are all being treated as genres, so we don't have to address whether a given play is historical fact, historical fiction, contemporary fact [for a sixth-grade audience in 2006 or after, is Samantha Smith's letter to Andropov history?]/