Blog #5: Chapter 1 BBG

This chapter taught me more about genres. I have always thought genres as something that was extremely generic and could categorize mostly anything in it if you tried hard enough. I also found them to be very scientific, with a checklist that must be met to match them and be a part of them. For example, a non-fiction book must contain factual material about a scientific or historical study. It must be educational and have nothing to do with fiction. However, I began to realize that a genre such as non-fiction could also fit into documentaries and biographies, where it can tell the dramatic story of a person’s life. It could be argued that books can fit into many categories, however something such as a memoir is meant for those close to you. It has a very specific audience and that is what is being written for. The topic is almost negligent with the importance of the audience and purpose. While something such as the Diary of Anne Frank was not intended for the mass audiences, it was written as a sort of memoir or auto-biography. Today however it seems to be viewed as a non-fiction work and that raises many questions to me. Can a work be classified in multiple genres? I assume yes, however can something be classified in one that it was not intended to be written for by the author? Losing control as an author is very scary, however when the audience finds your material, it is up to their interpretation and their feelings to classify it. The life of Frederick Douglass is read by millions of students yearly across America. This is written by Douglass as something for him to remember his life by, and yet now it is seemingly a factual experience of the life of a slave to not be interpreted at all today. I read it in his shoes, and finding myself there I found slavery to be much worse than many of my classmates felt. They found it as an experience that happened in the past and it just shouldn’t repeat, however they did not sympathize for the past. I believe the past is in the past, however it doesn’t mean that we should not learn from it. Experiences build wisdom, and books give experience.