Things to keep in mind:
The secret of genre.
The confirmation of the candidate as a member of the group establishes the superiority of group opinion over individual opinion and the authority of the group to define this relationship as one governed by civic duties. It is the nature of these duties which determines the categories into which civic intelligence falls. The group can never be anything more than a superstition, but the categories assemble all available material into a textual Corpus. There being no real funtional group surviving, this Corpus of group texts is used as the rallying point of the group, the counterpart of the primitive clan totem, the outward and visible sign of a long-extinct grace.
The Corpus, in making categorical demands upon the individual, thus limits the ways in which works may be conceived and presented. These demands become the only “inspiration” countenanced, and theoretically all creative supply has its source in them. This seems a fairly plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human society. The occurence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of human intelligibility. —We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves; it is all criticism of criticism.
—posted 5268 days ago
