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[ 159 ] 8 GENRE IN THE MARKETPLACE The Scene of Bookselling in Canada Julie Rak I n a collection about reading, it might seem odd to discuss something that at first glance is not about reading at all: the culture of bookstores and the kinds of information they codify and embody. But before a book can be read, it must be acquired in some fashion. There are many ways to get books into the hands of readers. For example, they can be given as gifts, awarded as prizes, borrowed from libraries, or even stolen. But at some point in the journey to readers, a book must be bought and sold like any other commodity, and unless it is bought directly from a publisher, it must be purchased from a bookstore, online retailer, or other type of retailer. Although most people who understand themselves to be readers do not think of their books as commodities, and many academics who study books—with the notable exception of book historians and publishing historians—do not think very much about the material circumstances of book acquisition, the scene of bookselling is closely linked to the reading cycle. But so far, little research has been conducted into the role of the contemporary bookstore in getting books to readers , and none at all has been carried out about the role that genre, and generic categorization, plays in organizing knowledge for readers in bookstores. Like reading itself, bookstores have cultures, and they aim to encourage the production of certain kinds of reading subjects who want to read (and purchase) books. In this essay I argue that at the heart of this transaction between potential readers and booksellers is an understanding of genre as a form of social production that organizes knowledge in the bookstore and determines how books make their sojourn from writers to publishers to sellers, and finally to readers. Why Genre Matters What is genre, and why does it matter? Originally “genre” signified the [ 160 ] Julie Rak organization of information into types or kinds. This led to an understanding of any genre as static, or as a closed system, with classification as its method.1 The classic understanding of genre as taxonomic and a matter of “pure” classification , particularly in literary studies, has been challenged by theorists in the fields of rhetoric and composition.2 Genre, these theorists claim, is intimately involved in making social life possible. To understand genre better as a social force in its own right, we can treat it as what Pierre Bourdieu would call a method of “position taking” in the cultural field,3 a way of organizing knowledge which has the effect of producing knowledge in its effort to organize it. This act of generic classification has at its heart an ideology of ordering which tries to make its own subjects as individuals interact with institutions, in what Charles Bazerman calls the expectations of “communicative social space” that are found in any use of genre.4 This kind of approach requires a return to a study of genre, not as an aesthetic category but as an important part of the production of meaning in culture. As Nick Lacey has pointed out, genre “is of little use critically but of great use in ‘common sense’ terms, which is how mass audiences use the concept.”5 Scholars who use what Richard Coe and others have called “the new genre theories”6 have made use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on speech genres to argue that genre is part of every social process,7 and that genre structures the terms of engagement for spoken and written utterances. In the field of information sciences, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Starr characterize “genre systems” (which they understand as the complex interaction of multiple genres) as encompassing many levels of the act of classification, including the making of lists and other types of codification practices.8 Following the lead of theorists who see genres governing many types of social interaction while simultaneously functioning as examples of classification , I understand the role of genre in bookstores to be scene-setting, because genres within the physical space of bookstores both set limits and create possibilities for knowledge transmission. In the case of reading, bookstores represent one kind of setting where the opening act of reading can take place. Since readers come to bookstores to get certain kinds of knowledge, to experience the physicality of a book in terms of its feel, look, or smell, or even just to talk...

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