Literary genres and ways of reading

What kind of person reads detective stories? Borges's answer is about how someone reads, not the reader's age or background. This reader is suspicious. A character says something, and the reader wonders whether to believe it. An apparently innocent event might be a clue. That habit could follow the reader into a story that isn't detective fiction at all.

That example helps us unpack the more abstract claim in A's second paragraph. Literature requires the reader and the text to come together. The words on the page matter, but so does what the reader does with them. A suspicious reader actively looks for hidden meanings and connections; the reader isn't just standing outside the literary experience observing it.

The final sentence extends that idea to genres. What unites the works in a genre is the way we read them, rather than simply a checklist of features inside them. We have moved from one particular reader—the detective-fiction reader—to a general account of how literature works. The author treats Borges's view as an insight and builds on it.

Main point of A: Readers help create the literary experience, and the way works are read unites them into genres.

B starts where A ends: how should we distinguish genres? Grouping stories by similar themes sounds reasonable, but what happens to a story near the boundary between, say, mystery and horror? Shared subject matter doesn't necessarily settle which category fits. B proposes a better basis: reading protocols.

A protocol is simply an approach to reading. Are we treating every detail suspiciously? Paying close attention to how the words sound? Watching for rules that make an imagined world different from ours? Those approaches affect what we notice and how we make sense of it. This connects directly to A's detective-fiction reader.

B then adds an important distinction. We can use any approach with any text, but some texts especially reward a particular approach. Think of reading a detective story closely for clues, or letting yourself enter a fantasy such as Harry Potter instead of rejecting everything unfamiliar. The point is that a way of engaging with a story can help it work for us. B's central examples of a genre were written to take advantage of their particular reading protocol.

So the text still has a role. B wants critics to examine the features that guide or encourage a way of reading. With poetry, we tend to attend more to the sound of words. Rhyme, for example, may draw our attention in a poem in a way it usually doesn't in a novel. With science fiction, we attend to how the story's world differs from ours, so the writing that reveals those differences matters. These are concrete examples of what the abstract word protocol means. B starts with a general theory, then shows us how to apply it.

Main point of B: Genres are best distinguished by reading protocols, and their central works use textual features to make a particular way of reading especially rewarding.

Both accounts put the reader's approach at the center. B also explains how a work can invite that approach. Keep the distinction between can and best in view: a protocol can be applied to any story, even though a particular story may reward one protocol more than another.