"Choosing" memes as a genre pt. 2/2

I love you, Michel de Certeau

In part one, I thought of a working definition for “choosing memes” as a genre:

1. they have three figures (agent, choice A, choice B);

2. they are (roughly) metaphors with a fixed vehicle and a user-generated tenor; and

3. they are concerned with shouldness — choosing between what is socially acceptable/expected and what is not.

But what is genre anyways? Is the idea even useful? Does it do any analytic work other than offering you the pleasure of placing things carefully down and watching them rest placidly in the boxes you have made?

Genre as Social Reflection

I’m thinking about Franco Moretti’s take on detective fiction as a genre in his essay The Slaughterhouse of Literature (2000). I think his approach of “distant reading” might work for memes. “Distant reading,” in that essay, meant looking at hundreds of detective stories from the late 1800s when the genre emerged in English-langu…