Taxonomies of Writing versus Principles and Operations: What Genre Can (and Can't) Do

The organisation of creative production into classes or genres has a very long history, emerging (at least) as early as Aristotle’s classifications in the Poetics. In the centuries that followed, the concept of genre shaped the construction of canons, markets, schools of practice, curriculum and literary analysis. By the mid-twentieth century, though, confidence in the logic of generic organisation began to tremble a little.
Do we create quarrels, or actual problems, when we call things arranged in sentences “poems”, or use strategies typically deployed in poetry to keep or fracture time in stories and essays? If genre no longer provides helpful distinctions and descriptions of our work, what alternatives can we offer?
In this paper I consider what writers actually do: not how we define or refuse to define a piece of writing, but rather how certain kinds of operations (which we may assign to lyric or narrative) work separately and/or together to create literary experiences.