MEDIA GENRES
POPULAR CULTURES – WEEK 8
What is ‘Genre’?
 ‘Kind’ or ‘class’
 Distinctive type of text
 Purpose – divide texts into types, each type is given a
name
 Characteristics
 A way of organising cultural products
 Specific forms
 Technique, style and theme are considered
 Can
you
genres?
name
some
significant
 What are there characteristics?
 Is technique, style and theme enough
to differentiate and identify genres?
 How else might we group genres?
 What other characteristics would be
useful?
David Bordwell, 1989
 Grouping by:
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Period / country
Director / star / producer / writer / studio
Technical process
By cycle
By series
By style
By structure
By ideology
By venue
By purpose
By audience
By subject / theme
Robert Stam, 2000
 Categorising films:
 Narrative content
 Borrowed from literature / other media
 Performer-based
 Budget-based
 Artistic status
 Racial identity
 Location
 Sexual orientation
Sub-genres?
 Texts mix genres
 Hybrid forms
 Some genres, and sub-genres, have no names (Fowler
1989, 216: Wales 1989, 206)
 There is no one single system / process for identifying
genres
 Genres are abstract conceptions
 ‘Any theme may appear in any genre’ (Bordwell 1989,
147)
 Producers and audience make use of their own labels
Four Key Problems with
Generic Labels
 Robert Stam (2000, 128-129):
 Extension – breadth / narrowness of labels
 Normativism – preconceived ideas of generic criteria
 Monolithic definitions – only belonging to one genre
 Biologism – assuming genres have standard life cycles/
There are no ‘rigid rules of inclusion and exclusion’ (Gledhill
1985, 60).
Genres over-lap – ‘mixed genres’ (Norman Fairclough 1995,
89)
Steve Neale, 1980
 ‘Genres are instances of repetition and difference’ (Steve
Neale, 1980, 48).
 New genres repeat certain elements, AND
 Add new elements
 New additions to genres, change that whole genres.
 Some genres are ‘looser’ – more open-minded,
permeable boundaries.
 Texts exhibit conventions of more than one genre.
 Generic diversity
‘Family Resemblances’
 Wittgenstein
 Similarities between texts within a genre
 A text rarely has ALL the generic conventions
 Critique – theories can make any text seem to
resemble another (Swales 1990, 51).
Purposes
 Defining genres is problematic
 People will continue to categorise texts
 Some genres are more widely used than others
 ‘Genres only exists in so far as a social group declares and
enforces the rules that constitute them’ (Hodge and Kress
1988, 7).
 Do we formulate explicit ‘rules’?
 Much of our knowledge is unspoken
 Genre is ‘what we collectively believe it to be’ (Andrew
Tudor).
Genres are Dynamic
 David Buckingham: ‘Genre is not… simply ‘given’ by a
culture: rather, it is in constant process of negotiation and
change’ (1993, 137).
 Boundaries between genres shift
 Genres, and the relationships between them change over
time
 Conventions of genres shift
 New genres, and sub-genres, emerge
 Other genres are ‘discontinued’
 Todorov: ‘A new genre is always the transformation of
one or several old genres’ (cited in Swales 1990, 36).
 What else may affect the changing
nature of genres?
The Interaction between
Genres and the Media
 Genres differ in status
 Status is attributed by producers and audiences
 Genre hierarchies shift over time
 Genres have commercial and industrial significance
 Denis McQuail (1987):
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Consistent and efficient production
Relates production to expectations of customers
Enables media user to plan choices
Orders the relations between producers and audiences
Economic Factors
 The Hollywood Model
 Steve Neale: ‘Genres … exists within the context of a set
of economic relations and practices’.
 Economic factors may account for the perpetuation of a
profitable genre
 Genres
create and
(Abercrombie 1996)
maintain
loyal
audiences
 Means of controlling demand (Neale 1980)
 Enable producers to predict audience expectations
 Process of targeting market sectors
Genres and Ideology
 Response to political, social and economic conditions
 Embody certain values and ideological assumptions
 Consider the following genres.
 What values / ideological assumptions do they
communicate?
 Horror
 Gangster
 Sci-fi
 Film Noir
 Road Movie
 Genres reflect values dominant at the time
 Genres may also shape values (Steve Neale 1980, 16)
 ‘A genre develops according to social conditions;
transformations in genre and texts can influence and
reinforce social conditions’ (Thwaites et al 1994, 100).
 ‘Cultural forum’: producers and audience negotiate shared
beliefs and values – maintain social order, adapting to
change.
 Reproduce dominant ideology – social control
 Oppositional readings
 Purposes – of producers and audiences: they don’t
always match
Relationships Between
Producers and Audiences
 Genres mediate between the industry and the audience
Text
Producers
Audiences
Shared Codes
 Between producers and audiences
 Systems of audio and visual signs
 Enable communication to take place
 Produce meanings
 Codes become conventions
 Audiences understand conventions
 Producers encode messages into texts
 Preferred readings; oppositional readings; negotiated
readings
Mode of Address
 Genres position audiences: interviewer / interviewee;
listener / storyteller; reader / writer
 Each position implies different possibilities for response
/ action
 ‘Ideal’ reader
ethnicity
/audience – class / age / gender /
Narrative Analysis
 Genres are myth systems
 Barthes – seek to explain our society
 Binary oppositions
‘Generic’ texts = ‘Formulaic’
Texts?
 Critics often regard generic texts inferior to those
produced outside of the generic framework.
 Why do you think this is?
Intertextuality
 Seeing individual texts in relation to others
 ‘Genre is… an intertextual concept’ (Katie Wales 1989,
259)
 Jacques Derrida: ‘A text cannot belong to no genre, it
cannot be without… a genre. Every text participates in
one or several genres, there is no genreless text (1981,
61).