Ancient rhetoric and modern genre criticism

Despite the excitement genre criticism has generated among rhetorical critics, its achievements and prospects are questionable. A good many new ideas introduced in recent criticism are, as it happens, very old; while many old ideas about genre remain largely misunderstood. At the same time, the critical distance required by genre theory and the tendency of generic classifications to proliferate into tiresome and useless taxonomies seem to draw critics farther and farther away from the objects of their critical attention. It is time critics came to grips with the problems stemming from the lack of historical perspective and the critical deficiencies of genre theories themselves evident in much recent critical research.