ABSTRACT
In the success of the spaghettis we might see an instance of what the Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky discerns as a frequent event in the life of a genre. That is, Shklovsky maintains (at least in relation to literary genres) that genres are regularly shifted, altered, and renewed through the displacement of dominant instances by what he calls their “junior branch” (Erlich, 260). The junior branch is often constituted in texts that do not display an absolute conformity to codes of generic or cultural verisimilitude (that is, to broadly defined cultural standards of what constitutes the real, the likely, the possible, and so on). These are texts that are frequently of largely popular appeal or that emerge from a nonsanctioned arena of culture: clearly this is the case with the spaghettis, whose unacceptability to the critical guardians in the tributary media and whose popularity with general audiences almost epitomize the social relations of a genre’s “junior branch.”
