Works that exhaustively define a genre

As everyone knows, one of my favorite things is postulating (after the manner of Balzac) categories that are so specific that they barely fit anything other than the single instance they are describing.

So, describing DANIEL DERONDA to Talya, I said, "It's one of those later works by an author that is still great, of course, because it is developing ideas that were already-present, but too ambitious to be purely enjoyable." And then the only other work I could think of to put in this category was ...And Justice for All, by Metallica.

[Yet another, still interesting, but broader, category would be: works obviously after an artist has peaked, but still worth having.]

Here's the one I'm working with today. Totally definitive generic works. The single most obvious example to demonstrate a genre. Not the "best," but maybe the least idiosyncratic while still rising above mediocrity. "Generic" therefore in the best sense. (Basically unambiguous.)

I encourage comments.

FILM----
Hollywood Western: Shane
Spaghetti Western: Big Gundown
Noir: Out of the Past (which I don't care for), or The Postman Always Rings Twice

MUSIC:
Grindcore: Terrorizer "World Downfall"
Youth Crew: Project X 7"
UK82: Partisans "Police Story"
Thrash Metal: Metallica "Kill Em All" or Megadeth "Peace Sells"
Country Rock: Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"
Glam: David Bowie "Ziggy Stardust"
NWOBHM: Diamond Head "Lightning to the Nations"
Goth: Sisters of Mercy "First and Last and Always"
British Invasion: I have a record in mind from a previous conversation but I can't remember what I think the answer to this one is.
Oi: Blitz, "Voice of a Generation"
Black Metal: Ulver, "Nattens Madrigal"
Shoegaze: My Bloody Valentine "Loveless"
name some more...

Books:
Tragedy: Oedipus Rex
Epic: The Aeneid
Romanticism: Tintern Abbey
Realist novel: Also couldn't think of one here. Something by Trollope maybe?

In a way, there shouldn't be "argument" about this, because the very premise is "We all agree that this is what XXXX genre is, therefore we should agree on its exemplification in YYYY work." But I haven't read/heard/seen everything; there might be a way more normative oi! album that "Voice of a Generation," for instance...

Reading on the Subway, con't.

Elm Rock City has a good post up right now about a topic near and dear to our hearts, and recently discussed (below): what makes people read or not read great books?

[Addition: in many of the comments to said post, there is what amounts to a disparaging of reading as something not special, something "untimely" and impractical. But if that is how one feels, you've already played your hand as to whether people should be reading classic literature. If it is something to do with calculation, efficiency, maximized returns on one's time, and immediate relevancy, literature will lose every time. It is only when literature takes us outside of that part of our lives which does not have time for it, that we learn to make time for it.]

I worked at a bookstore all through high school, and last year, and this is what people buy (in Texas, at least):

• self-help books
• Christian self-help books
• cookbooks and bargain books
• NY Times-approved things like READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN
• Harry Potter books
• THE LIFE OF PI, BEE SEASON, WHITE TEETH, etc.
  

What no one ever bought was non-canonical yet "classic" literature; if JUDE THE OBSCURE sold a few copies, certainly FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD did not. If PORTRAIT OF A LADY sold, THE GOLDEN BOWL did not. MADAME BOVARY but certainly not SALAMMBO. You see what I'm getting at--a kind of "greatest hits" that transforms virtually every author into a "one-hit" wonder [with certain exceptions: Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have two novels each, but Balzac or Zola none].

Still, I have to admit, in New York people *do* read more than anywhere else. Case in point: hipster folk band Effi Briest. In any other town, Rainer Maria (qua reference) is probably over people's heads...much less a novel by the mega obscure Theodor Fontane.

Eventually I am going to write something about philosophy and reading on my other blog, but I do believe that reading is (or can be/should be) thinking, and that there is no substitution for it, and that learning is not valuable despite the time it takes, but because of the time it takes: the inefficient, the inconvenient, are so for a reason--"consumption" is alien to the lasting qualities of these works. (Take Dickens for instance; the idea that Dickens is stuffy or hard or anything but pure entertainment would have been laughable a hundred years ago: that he has become so seems not co-incidental.)

I do not understand someone wanting to finish (be "done with") Proust, Milton, Sterne... don't you just want these things to keep going?

Summer Reading List

Unlike most people, I read novels "for a living," so my summer reading has a lot of the critical/philosophical/psychoanalytic books that I don't get to read during the school year. The point of posting this is if anyone else is reading these things, get in touch and we can read them together. Particularly the Beckett novels and "The Wolf Man."

PICKWICK PAPERS (Dickens)
VANITY FAIR (Thackeray)
DANIEL DERONDA (Eliot)
WOMAN IN WHITE (Collins)
SODOM AND GOMORRAH (Proust)
BLUE AND BROWN BOOKS (Wittgenstein)
INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (Freud)
FUNDAMENTALS OF LANGUAGE (Jakobson)
DECEIT DESIRE AND THE NOVEL (Girard)
FOUR FUNDAMENTALS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (Lacan)
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (Kant)
DIALOGIC IMAGINATION (Bakhtin)
MARXISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE (Bakhtin)
MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMEABLE (Beckett)
THE WOLF MAN (Freud)
THE WOLF MAN'S MAGIC WORD (Torok, Abraham, Derrida)