Cooper's Author Classifications and Genre

Anna Julia Cooper's classification of authors into two groups seemed particularly interesting to me in light of our recent discussions about literary genre. It seems that the texts people write because they have "an idea to propagate...a purpose or lesson" (Cooper 381) fit easily into the idea of genre classification. Texts that have a rhetorical purpose are presumably responding to "recurrent social situations" that motivate these texts, to use the description of Carolyn Miller in "Genre as Social Action."

However, the authors who "write because they please...with no thought of an audience" (Cooper 380) seem to pose some problems, or at least complexities, in the system that Miller suggests. These authors with no audience seem to be almost outside the system of genre, because if they are creating simply for the joy of creation, what is the situation, the social action, that requires their text? It seems that Cooper is still suggesting that text is socially motivated, because she talks about the "black man's vexations and chafing environment," which have "goaded him into the eloquence of fire and oratory" (383). The reason why black people fail to create text for text's sake (one might even say, for sublimity's sake) is because of the social conditions that motivate them to create text to persuade or justify or inform.

However, I think the distinction between different types of authors begs this question: Is it possible to have a text that is separate from genre? According to what we have read up to this point, I'd be inclined to answer no. And yet here does seem to be some indication here that true inspiration transcends the kind of classifications that genre requires...