ABSTRACT
Several years ago, in a paper for The American Scholar, Clifford Geertz reflected on the vast amount of what he called ‘genre blurring’, or ‘jumbling of discourse varieties’, in recent academic life. As he sees it, there are a large number of writers and texts that escape any clear definition and location on the academic map. They have emerged not simply as a result of ‘another redrawing’ of the boundaries between one discipline and another; instead they reflect a radical ‘alteration of the very principles of mapping’ (Geertz, 1983: 20). Geertz discusses some of the writers who fall into this category, and it is almost certain that if he had written his essay a few years later, he would have included the recent writings of neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks in his list of ‘blurred-genre’ texts. Sacks’ major works, for instance, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, can be seen variously as collections of biographical anecdotes, as short stories and as medical case studies. One’s difficulties with categorizing and locating these texts begin in the library.
