Richard, a quick question -- you have said I think a couple times that the Genesis account is a cosmogony in the form of a history, while maintaining that it is not actual history. My immediate thought as an unsophisticated housewife was, 'how deceptive'. If you admit that it is in the form of history, is there any reason (disregarding science, as you indicate that your argument is more based on the text) for denying that it is both cosmogony and actual history, other than an argument that ANE myths don't work this way? (But doesn't that argument lose some of its force if ANE myths were corrupted as they were passed down and more mythologized, mixing some remnant of truth with much error while the biblical creation account was not in this way corrupted?)
You mentioned T. S. Eliot. The first time I read his poem 'The Wasteland' I thought it was a rather incoherent, but beautiful, jumble of images and thoughts without a real ideological structure or explanation. It seemed the only sensible reading to me, not because of the genre (all the poetry I had read up to that point was coherent) but because of the poem itself. When I found out people wrote whole books assigning coherent symbologies to it, I thought they had to be falling for a hoax. When I found out he did, I thought he had to be perpetrating it. It turns out that he was. He said in an interview that it was structureless, and that he wasn't even bothering whether he understood what he was saying. See
this link about the notes. Yet if we look at his other poems and the genre, we would be led to read significance and coherence into the poem that isn't there. My point is that even in literature, trying to interpret away a natural reading of a text because of other things in the same genre isn't always a sound interpretative rule?
(added: by the way I agree with Patrick that the genre is actually historical narrative that sets forth a cosmogony: but even if we were to lump it in the same genre with ANE myths and focus on the cosmogony more I don't know that it follows to stop reading the creation account as literal history.)