Genre

What is genre?

Genre helps us study texts and audience responses to texts by dividing them into categories based on common elements. 

Daniel Chandler (2001): argues that the word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for 'kind' or 'class'. The term is widely used in rhetoric, literary theory, media theory to refer to a distinctive type of ‘text’.

All genres have sub genres. 

Barry Keith Grant (1995): Genre divided up into more specific categories that allow audiences to identify them specifically by their familiar and what become recognisable characteristics

Steve Neale (1995): “Genres are not ‘systems’ they are processes of systematization” – i.e. They are dynamic and evolve over time.

Jason Mittell (2001): Genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience, and cultural practices as well.

Rick Altman (1999): Genre offers audiences ‘a set of pleasures’

•         Emotional Pleasures: The emotional pleasures offered to audiences of genre films are particularly significant when they generate a strong audience response.
•          Visceral Pleasures: Visceral pleasures (‘visceral’ refers to internal organs) are ‘gut’ responses and are defined by how the film’s stylistic construction elicits a physical effect upon its audience. This can be a feeling of revulsion, kinetic speed, or a ‘roller coaster ride’.
•          Intellectual Puzzles: Certain film genres such as the thriller or the ‘whodunit’ offer the pleasure in trying to unravel a mystery or a puzzle. Pleasure is derived from deciphering the plot and forecasting the end or the being surprised by the unexpected.

COMEDY OR ANIMATION ARE NOT GENRES

They're styles or treatments

The Strengths Of Genre Theory

The main strength of genre theory is that everybody uses it and understands it – media experts use it to study media texts, the media industry uses it to develop and market texts and audiences use it to decide what texts to consume.

The potential for the same concept to be understood by producers, audiences and scholars makes genre a useful critical tool. Its accessibility as a concept also means that it can  be applied across a wide range of texts.

Genre Themes

David Bordwell (1989): 'any theme may appear in any genre‘.

Horror films, for example, are basically just modern fairy tales and often act as morality plays in which people who break society’s rules are punished.

Fear of the unknown – the monster is the ‘monstrous other’ i.e. anything that is scary because it is foreign or different.

Sex = death – in horror movies, especially Slasher movies, sex is immoral and must be punished, werewolf movies can be seen as a metaphor for puberty, vampires can be as metaphors for sexually transmitted diseases or rape etc.

The breakdown of society – post-apocalyptic movies are about our fear (or secret desire for) of the breakdown of society. The collapse of civilisation results in human kind reverting to their animal instincts.

David Buckingham (1993): 'Genre is not... Simply "given" by the culture: rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change’.