Afterwords: Forms of Death

Responding to this volume on genre, and especially to the Introduction, "Forms-of-life", this Afterword contemplates genre as it is uttered through forms of semantic death: truisms, cliches, and dead metaphors. Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida's essay "Living On," from Bakhtin on speech genres, and Samuel Beckett's bilingual "La Fin/The End," it turns to love lyric writing by the English poet John Gower and his older contemporary Guillaume de Machaut. It argues that Gower uses the genre of the ballade sequence, in the wake of Machaut's own novel explorations, to explore the dead but potent lacunas between one utterance and another, between one ballade and another, and between one language and another. In the process he works with the capacity of love discourse to offer truths even into old age (a major preoccupation of his love poetry): truths about how language might be shown to respond to language as it lives on from one cliche to the next.