GENRE STUDIESModule content and expectations for English 3

Concepts behind Genre Studies

Exploration:

• Themes, ideas and concepts

• Comparison

• Connection

• Conventions

• Text types (at least one print, one non-print text)

• Audiences

Work Requirements

• One oral presentation

• One analytical response

• One imaginative response within the specified genre

Criteria: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7

• 1. *analyse how relationships between ideas, texts, genres and contexts shape meaning and response

• 2. *analyse representations of themes, ideas and concepts in texts

• 4. *compose and craft responses to texts

• 5. compose and craft imaginative responses

• 6. *use accurate and effective language

• 7. apply time management, planning, negotiation and academic integrity skills.

• Genre Studies

• - Arose in film studies in the 1970s

• - Countered the author/auteur-based criticism of the 1950s

• Thinking about creativity beyond a singular figure, focusing on the genre rather than the author

• What is the difference between a genre-based story and a non-genre story?

• Genre stories are framed by codes and conventions. All aspects of the text tend to conform to audience expectations, including:• Narrative

• Characterisation

• Themes

• Setting

• Iconography

• Filmic techniques

• Mood

• Mode of address

• The more complex and diverse a society, the more genres we have (Miller, 1984 in Chandler 1997)

‘Genres are not systems: they are processes of systematization’ (Neale 1980 in Chandler 1997)

‘Genre is in a constant process of negotiation and change’ (Buckingham 1993 in Chandler 1997)

• Christine Gledhill: the ‘difference between genres meant different audiences could be identified and catered to… This made it easier to standardise and stablise production’ (Chandler 1997)

• - So genres are essential for mass media production

• Todorov: ‘a new genre is always the transformation of one or several old genres’

• Subgenres emerge and can move into fully-fledged genres (Chandler 1997)

• Contemporary genre texts often combine several genre forms, such as Romantic Comedy, Romantic Thriller

• ‘A genre… defines a moral and social world’ (Tudor, 1974 in Chandler 1997)

• Fiske: often genre conventions ‘embody the crucial ideological concerns of the time in which they are popular’

• Neale: Genres can also help shape such values (Chandler 1997)

• Marxist approach: The audience and industry ‘negotiate shared beliefs and values, helping to maintain social order and assisting it in adapting to change’ (Chandler)

• This argument suggests then that not only do popular fiction texts reflect social order, but actively help to maintain it.

• Steve Neale on Hollywood and genre:

• Genres can function to provide ‘both regulation and variety’.

• The spectator has an experience of mastery and fullness (via genre films) but is a process, involving moments of control, moments of flux, and instability.

• Coherence of the cinematic institution:

• Industry

• Text

• Subject

• Constant movement between repetition and difference)

• (Neale, S. Genre. British Film Institute. UK, 1980)

• Genres help the producers of a text and the audience of a text to communicate.

• Fowler: “Communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre”

• Within genres, texts embody the author’s attempt to ‘position’ readers using ‘particular modes of address’ (Dominant reading)

• Different genres also involve different purposes, pleasures, audiences, modes of involvement, styles of interpretation and text-reader relationships.

• Reader-response theory

• Dominant reading of a text

• Resistant reading of a text

• Gunther Kress: Genre is ‘a kind of text that derives its form from the structure of a social occasion, with its characteristic participants and their purposes’ (in Chandler 1997).

• It helps ‘any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers.’ (McQuail 1987 in Chandler 1997)

• INTERTEXTUALITY is essential to understanding genre.

• Thwaites et al: “Each text is influenced by the generic rules in the way it is put together; the generic rules are reinforced by each text”

Look at the following extract:• “The clock on the mantelpiece said ten thirty, but someone

had suggested recently that the clock was wrong. As the figure of the dead woman lay on the bed in the front room, a no less silent figure glided rapidly from the house. The only sounds to be heard were the ticking of that clock and the loud wailing of an infant.”

• Dubrow (quoted in Bawarshi 2000) asks: what characteristics should we pay attention to as significant? What state of mind need we assume to interpret the action it describes?

• - Genre helps the reader interpret the text.

If readers know the title of the novel is Murder at Maplethorpe,readers make decisions about the value and meaning of particular images via the detective genre. (The inaccuracy of the clock, the dead woman, a possible suspect…”)

• However, if the title of the novel was The Personal History of David Marplethorpe, we might read it is a Buildungsromanand we wouldn’t read it with ‘detective eyes’.

• The crying baby might be David Marplethorpe

• This is the genre function (Dubrow 1984, Barwarshi 2000)

• Fiske (1987): “A representation of a car chase only makes sense in relation to all the others we have seen – after all, we are unlikely to have experienced one in reality, and if we did, we would, according to this model, make sense of it by turning it into another text… There is then a cultural knowledge of the concept ‘car chase’ that any one text is a prospectus for, and that it is used by the viewer to decode it, and by the produce to encode it”( in Chandler 1997)

Gender and Genre

• Some genre forms have been aimed at and favoured by either a male or female audience.

• However, audiences do not passively take on dominant readings built into the text. Often reading a text involves negotiation, resistance, and/or rejection.

Features of Genre Fiction according to Daniel Chandler:

• NARRATIVE – Similar (sometimes formulaic) plots and structures, predictable situations, sequences, episodes, obstacles, conflicts and resolutions

• Inciting incident

• Progressive complications

• Crisis

• Climax

• Resolution (Robert McKee’s theory)

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE (TODOROV)• A state of equilibrium at the outset

• A disruption of the equilibrium by some action

• A recognition that there has been a disruption

• An attempt to repair the disruption

• A reinstatement of the equilibrium (but the protagonist and possibly the world around him or her is transformed)

• CHARACTERISATION:

• Similar types of characters (sometimes stereotypes), roles, personal qualities, motivations, goals, behaviour

• THEMES:

• Topics, subject matter (social, cultural, psychological, professional, political, sexual, moral), values and what Stanley Solomon refers to as recurrent ‘patterns of meaning’ (Solomon 1995: 456)

• SETTING – Geographical and historical

• ICONOGRAPHY (echoing the narrative, characterisation, themes and setting) – a familiar stock of images or motifs, the connotations of which have become fixed, primarily but not necessarily visual, including décor, costume and objects, certain ‘typecast’ performers (some of whom may have become ‘icons’), familiar patterns of dialogue, characteristic music and sounds, and appropriate physical topography

• FILMIC TECHNIQUES – stylistic or formal conventions of camera work, lighting, sound recording, use of colour, editing etc)

• MOOD AND TONE

• MODE OF ADDRESS – there are sometimes inbuilt assumptions about the audience (to do with age, class, gender, ethnicity)

• CHANDLER: Some film genres tend to be defined primarily by their subject matter (e.g detective films), some by their setting (e.g the Western) and others by their narrative form (e.g the Musical).

References

• Bawarshi, Anis. The Genre Function in College English. Vol 62 No. 3 Jan 2000 pp 335 – 360

• Chandler, Daniel (1997) An Introduction to Genre Theory

• Hutchings, Peter. Genre Theory and Criticism, 2007 http://afc-

theliterature.blogspot.com.au/2007/07/genre-theory-and-criticism-by-peter.html

• Neale, Steve. Genre. British Film Institute. UK, 1980