MIGHT ELECTRONIC MUSIC—A MAJOR FORCE BEHIND CHANGES IN ACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGY, COPYRIGHT LAW, HUMAN-MACHINE INTERface, artistic production, marketing and consumption practices, and global connectivity—help us think about the dizzying proliferation of today's written forms and how we talk about them? It can certainly offer new models and a rich vocabulary for speaking about such things as labeling, canon, and the relationship between author and audience. As “text” continues to bloat, shrink, scatter, and blur, thanks in part to the same digital tools used by contemporary e-music, perhaps looking at how this sound swarm is dealing with its identity will be useful to those who read, write, and write about literature. The essay that follows invites literary scholars to “listen awry” to a wildly polyvalent, indeterminate musical complex that simultaneously lobbies for, rejects, and eludes categorization.

When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, bucharest was called “little Paris,” the nickname implicitly measured the distance that Romania had covered on the road to modernization and westernization. The process was slow, because there were huge discrepancies between the efforts of a minority elite pushing for the entrance of the country “into Europe” and the indifference of a majority population with minimal standards of living. Despite important events favorable to the country's development—the union of the Romanian principalities (Moldavia and Walachia) in 1859 and its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878—Romania was, for most of the nineteenth century, still a province of the Ottoman Empire.

On saturdays we sometimes drive across the city to buy fish. We stand at the counter and try to choose fresh fish in a land-locked city—pink salmon, gray sole, yellow kabeljou, silver red roman. Delicious fish, at least six hours from the nearest coast. After that, we're back in the car, on the road. If we take the highway around the city, we see the mine dumps, man-made hills of gold dust, yellow in the winter sun, relics of the old gold mines on which this city was founded, heaving earth to the surface, the debris of wealth extraction. From all around, among and beyond the gold dumps, the city rises.

If you had typed genre into amazon.com's search engine on a certain day in March 2007, you would have come up with an initial ten listings that included two gay men's magazines (Genre and Instinct Magazine), one introductory theoretical text (my own Genre), a compact disc by a group called D-Genre, a composition textbook (Tom Romano's Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers), three resource kits for children (Carson-Dellosa's Literary Genres, Susan Ludwig's Twenty-Four Ready-to-Go Genre Book Reports: Engaging Activities with Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need to Help Students Get the Most Out of Their Independent Reading, and a bulletin-board set entitled BB Set Genres of Lit), and, finally, two school textbooks (Tara McCarthy's Teaching Genre (Grades 4–8) and Heather Lattimer's Thinking through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshops 4–12).

No concept is more fundamental to literary study than genre. It is virtually impossible to think seriously about literature without considering the codes or conventions that structure literary texts. Aristotle's distinction between the “poetic kinds” of epic and drama and Horace's insistence on poetic decorum are early attempts to distinguish among types of creative expression in order to understand and appreciate the specific excellences of each. The most enduring typology of genres divides literature into three classes, depending on who speaks in and therefore controls the work. As M. H. Abrams represents these distinctions, they consist of “lyric (uttered throughout in the first person), epic or narrative (in which the narrator speaks in the first person, then lets his characters speak for themselves); and drama (in which the characters do all the talking).” Other divisions have been proposed (e.g., Northrop Frye's division of comedy, tragedy, irony, and satire), as have more nuanced accounts of genre itself that focus on how genres can cross, mix, and stretch to include deviations from type. But as a means of imposing a preliminary principle of order on an immense and various field, genre is an indispensable concept.

Twenty-five kilometers west of my Suburban Johannesburg apartment lies maropeng, the cradle of humankind World Heritage Site. Recently, twelve years since South Africa's first nonracial democratic elections, Mrs. Ples and the Taung Child, two of the paleoanthropological world's oldest skulls, were jointly exhibited. Considered to be the originators of all humanity, they are the global signifier of humanity shared. They are also foundational in forging a postapartheid united South African nationhood and in underpinning President Thabo Mbeki's continent-wide African Renaissance movement. Maropeng's proximity to Johannesburg, in its day “the model apartheid city” (Czeglédy 23), renders additionally acute past policies of racial segregation that shaped the city and, until the demise of apartheid, robbed me and my fellow citizens of the capacity to shape or interpret a shared experience of the city.

In Europe, as michel foucault aptly pointed out, western identity was constituted by the privileging of time and history (understood as alive, fluid, and ontological) over space (viewed as inert and dead); Latin America has followed a diametrically opposed process. The urban and the city in particular have dominated Latin American thought since 1492. Shaped by metropolitan centers much more than cultures in early modern Europe, the great pre-Hispanic civilizations forced the conquistadors to understand the process of conquest and evangelization in terms of urbanization. It suffices to see the map of the great city of Tenochtitlán (today's Mexico City) that accompanies Hernán Cortés's second letter to Emperor Charles V, his “Carta de relación,” and to read about the awe that overcame the historian Bernal Díaz del Castillo when he first saw the sheer vastness, beauty, and order of the great Aztec center to understand the important role urban planning would play throughout the colonial period and well beyond.