SOURCE: Lide, Barbara. “Perspectives on a Genre: Strindberg's comédies rosses.” In Strindberg and Genre, edited by Michael Robinson, pp. 149-66. Norvik Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Lide looks at the body of Strindberg's work that can be classified as comedy.

In an article entitled ‘Why We Can't Help Genre-alizing and How Not to Go About It’, the American genre specialist Paul Hernadi proposes as one of two main theses that ‘all knowledge is genre-bound in both senses of the word: it is tied up with and directed towards conceptual classification.’ Hernadi quotes I. A. Richards's statements that ‘perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort’ and that ‘thinking, from the lowest to the highest—whatever else it may be—is sorting.’¹ Or, as Jan Myrdal phrased it, ‘it's the human aspect—you sort things out.’² As literary scholars, we consistently engage in such...