Passage A In a 1978 lecture titled “The Detective Story,” Jorge Luis Borges observes that, “The detective novel has created a special type of reader,” and adds, “If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction.” For Borges, this special type of reader confronts literature with such incredulity and suspicions that he or she might read any narrative as a detective story.
Topic
The relationship between literary genres and the ways readers approach texts—how genres are less about textual features and more about the reader's mode of reading.
Framework
Old / New — Both passages reject the traditional, “Old” way of categorizing genres (by content or form) and advance a “New” approach: genres are characterized by how readers read (i.e., by reading protocols).
Main Point
Both Borges and the author of Passage B argue that literary genres are shaped primarily by the expectations, approaches, and participation of readers—what really unites a genre is how it is read, not just its formal content. - (End of Passage A, Paragraph 2) - (Passage B, Paragraph 1)
P1 (Passage A): The Detective Reader and Borges’s Interest
Borges claims that detective stories create a special kind of reader—one who is suspicious and always looking for clues—which inspired Borges’s own writing and supports a more general insight about literature and how we read it.
P2 (Passage A): Reader Participation Defines Genre
According to Borges, literature isn’t complete without the reader’s participation. What links works within a genre is not their contents, but how readers approach and interact with them.
P1 (Passage B): Critique of Content-Based Genre & New Proposal
Defining genre by content is messy—there are always texts that don’t fit. It’s more effective to see genres as sets of reading protocols: the patterns and expectations readers bring to and use with certain texts.