Gatunek jako forma życia
Genre as Form-of-Life

Summary/Abstract: This essay argues for the importance of re-evaluating the medieval genres and genre theories. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “form-of-life,” based on monastic practice, the essay considers how early writing represents genre as intrinsically linked with experience and practice. In medieval genres, taxonomies, prescriptions, and conventions take shape within a lifeworld of text and practice. And, for this reason, early genre and genre theory complicate some of the binaries on which later genre theory sometimes relies: the instrumental and the aesthetic, the innovative and the conventional, the pure form and the hybrid, the read and the performed.

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