• DOI:10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1571
• Corpus ID: 162901467

Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives

@article{Folsom2007DatabaseAG,
  title={Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives},
  author={Ed Folsom},
  journal={PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America},
  year={2007},
  volume={122},
  pages={1571 - 1579}
}

• Ed Folsom
• Published 1 October 2007
• Art
• PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

genre, in its most reductive form, seemed to have conquered all. Suddenly, you walked down the aisle and, instead of the cacophony of a hundred brands, each bearing its identifying bright colors and trademarks, each arguing for its uniqueness, saw endless rows of plain white or yellow packaging with black letters: Laundry Deter gent, Beef Stew, Pinto Beans, Beer. Every week, the invasion of generic products took over a larger segment of American grocery stores. It seemed the apotheosis of the generic was on the horizon. Soon, or so it then appeared, wild variety would be tamed, and we would all be buying the same plain packages. Category had prevailed; the borders were secured. I began to imagine that the generic revolution would inevitably take over the publishing world as well and that we'd soon enter a bookstore to see shelves of identical plain yellow covers with stark black titles: Poetry, Stories, Drama, Essays, Novel. If those generic books had come to exist (and, of course, they have, even if dressed in multicolored covers with various publishers' names on them, like Norton and Heath and Macmillan), I know how I would have found Walt Whitman. He would have been in the big yel low book with Poetry on the cover. But therein lies the problem. Our impulses always tend to funnel artists into one or another genre. Most authors work in multiple genres, but over time they get aligned with one category: not only do generic instincts pigeonhole literary works, they pigeonhole authors too. Rigidity is a quality of our categorical systems, not of the writers or usually the works we put into those sys tems. Most of my graduate students are still surprised to find Whit man wrote a novel and published fiction in some of the country's best journals; his stories appeared next to those of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Most are surprised to learn how he experi mented throughout his life with mixing poetry and prose, sometimes on the same page, testing the boundaries of genre and performing typographical experiments that forced readers to engage the printed ED FOLSOM is the Roy J. Carver Profes sor of English at the University of Iowa. The author or editor of numerous books and essays on Whitman and other Amer ican writers, he edits the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and the Iowa Whitman Series at the University of Iowa Press, and he coedits the online Walt Whitman