Evidential dilemma

• texts don’t tell—and they lie about—their genre
• should genre be discussed only as an analytical category, post hoc researcher’s tool?
• this solution would ignore the question of the social reality of genres
• so how about adding evidence by taking the context of the text into account?
• unfortunately, it’s not any easier—in fact, it’s much harder— to characterize the context with clean, sharp features
• it just seems genres don’s fit any “Platonic” categorization