Malleable poetics?

One of the primary questions I have about Miner’s poetics is the seemingly unidirectional premise of literary categories. For example, right in the beginning, when he discusses how poetics assumes literature as autonomous knowledge: “Once we begin to think in terms of autonomous kinds of knowledge, we order our social institutions to reflect them: the Chinese literatus, the renaissance patron and poet, school curricula, departments of universities, even publisher's catalogues” (15). There seems to be a chicken-and-the-egg kind of question embedded in this premise. I can see how the assumption of autonomous knowledge (though I'd still like to parse through this term) would lead to these categorical organizations, but aren't those organizations also constitutive of our conception of the autonomous knowledge?

His discussion of the utility of different kinds of knowledges and their degree of utility toward each other (p. 15) reminds of blood types. This analogy comes up for me again when he talks about genre leakages (221). I'm not sure where that analogy will take me…perhaps it speaks once again to a notion of originary autonomy which is rooted in a unidirectional (from the genes of the genre outward) poetics.

The question comes up for me again in his discussion of the lesson he uses to teach his students about differences between genres. It is interesting to note the “genre action verbs” he groups together (I say HIM, because I assume the exercise is designed to guide his students toward these): “Students quickly identify a still scene from nature or a lovers' embrace as lyric ("presence" and "intensification," "matters of moment"). They will identify a defined area with people actively inter involved as drama ("estrangement" and "engagement," "make-up"). Ant they will identify what seems to go on as narrative ("continuum" and "fulfillment," "movement").” So once again, how much of these action verbs, and their categories, are uniderectionally determined?

I’m still left with this question of the unidirectionality of the canon when I read Pandit. She refers to the new Norton anthology as a “mirror of changing, expanding, massively pluralist world culture.” How does the anthology constitute the canon rather than simply reflect it? Her reference to the addition of “textual space” seems to be related to this question. What kind of space does “the canon” exist in, how is that space constructed, and what are its tools?

Pandit makes a compelling case for applying a cultural variety of theoretical tools as a means of illuminating previously unavailable resonances of signification. But something about this still gives me pause. Maybe it’s my training so far, or somehow I’m default just one of those cultural purists she critiques. It seems that in using these widely (contextually) different analytical tools (which I would like to think we'd be able to do), the anchor must return to the text, and emphasize how what we've discovered through the mobilization of that tool makes sense for the text. Otherwise, I don’t see how we avoid Miner’s critique of comparative work executed through a lens of a discursive tool (in his example Freud or Marx), which becomes an ideological exercise.