Chapter 16

Genre

What It Is and Why It Matters

Ava Arndt

The word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for “kind” or “class”.  It is loosely associated with “classification” and represents a method of sorting different types of items.  The term  is widely used to refer to a distinctive type of text, painting, song or film.  For example, you might love horror films or punk rock music and detective novels while your roommate might be more drawn to biographies, symphonies and film Noir.  Each of these descriptors explains the type, kind or class of reading, listening and viewing two people enjoy.  While genre is somewhat less scientific than Darwin’s species classifications, they serve similar purposes.  Genre aims to divide literature (as well as art, music and film) into types and to name those types for the benefit of all people who might approach them, as well as people who aim to create them.

Goethe's Faust, for example, which you will read in Humanities Core, is a play, and it is also a tragedy.  That is to say, it is a piece of writing in the genre of a play and it is a a play in the genre of tragedy, one that is serious and dramatic, adhering to a set of particular generic conventions and which is not intended to be (principally) funny.  Being funny is reserved for plays (or other artworks) that adhere to the genre and generic conventions of comedy.  One of the simplest/most basic distinctions between the genres of tragedy and comedy is that comedies have happy endings, while tragedies do not.  One way to understand genre, then, is as a specification of social practices -- we see comedy as equalling X and drama as equalling Y or a poem as being the shape of Z and rock music as having tendencies L.  These social practices are both creative/authorial and spectatorial, meaning they exist for both the artist and the viewer/reader/listener.  They also cut across mediums.  Genres exists for and in many different forms.

Why Genre Matters

This leads us to one of the reason why genre matters: knowing what to expect.  If you pick up a book of poetry you will not expect to be reading full paragraphs of reportorial, factual prose.  You will expect short sentences, often fragments of sentences and an evocative, imaginative style.  When you go on-line to download a film on Hulu or Netflix and search under “action” you will not expect (or desire) to find a love story.  In this way genre helps inform an audience about what it is going to experience and what it can expect from the work in front of them. 

Genre also informs the artist.  When a writer or painter or filmmaker sets out to create their art they work within established conventions of forms prescribed by genre.  Genre provides artists with a code, or recipe for structuring their work.  Different genres have different meanings and sensibilities that might be more or less appropriate for telling a certain story or getting a particular emotion or point across to an audience.  Artists choose genres because of these meanings and sensibilities and also because most genres also have an inherent message they want to amplify, contrast, explore or extend.  Even though many artists choose to write or perform tragedy or comedy, it is doubtful any two tragedies or comedies will end up exactly the same, even though many different artists will create them using the “recipe” for tragedy or comedy. 
 
Sometimes artists purposefully play with established genres or combine them in new ways.  Some of the texts you will read this year in Humanities Core, in fact, defy an easy genre classification.  Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, for example is kind of a novel and kind of a memoir.  It also includes history.  What does this mean? Why do you think Kingston chose to combine different genres in her book?  Is she trying to confuse her readers in some way or is she making a statement about classifications, how stories get told?  Likewise, you may have heard the term “comic-tragedy” or “fictional memoir”.  The Bible is another text that defies easy classification: is it a memoir, or more of a biography? Is it fact? Fiction? A treatise or speech?  Prof. Jack Miles writes about the issue of classifying the Bible and other religious texts in Chapter 5. 

What Genre Can Teach Us

So what is to be gained from generic classification, especially when so often people break the rules?  In many ways what knowledge of genre allows us to do is have a cultural conversation about literature or other forms of art (film, music).  Most texts, most pieces or music or art are strongly influenced by their relationship to one or more genre, even if they willfully alter those forms.  Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel, China Men, is, in particular, one example of a text that remains strongly influenced by the novel genre, as well as the legal-document genre and the memoir genre, even as it tries to alter or overturn those categories.

Generic affiliations and deviations help us unearth historical context and meaning, even the politics, of a text or artwork.  Genre also allows for a more general discussion of art or writing in the sense that one can discuss the surge of Punk Rock in the 70s and 80s and the ways the development of that genre transformed popular music, or the decline of the popularity of poetry and the rise of the novel, or more recently, graphic novels or film as the primary form of story-telling in the United States.  the current (and persistent) popularity of vampire stories in novels, films and graphic art forms, might tell us something about culture in the US today. 

Genre also prepares you to function within, understand and interact with a variety of forms.  It can also teach you about appropriateness: when to use or seek particular kinds of writing, music, film or other artwork.  You wouldn’t want to use the novel genre for your Humanities Core essay assignment, and you likely would not use the academic essay genre when writing to your best friend (or texting them).  The reason you know this is genre: our agreed upon conventions, or categories, of forms of expression.  Genre is not static, as the texting example shows.  New genres are created regularly.

Genre’s Limitations

Although genre gives us a way to talk about the production of art or compare artistic pieces, and can provide a way of getting at meaning, it is not, primarily an evaluative tool.  While knowing the genre of a work of art of piece of literature will tell you something about its character -- what it is and maybe how it was made, but it is not an exhaustive tool.  As we have seen, generic categories do not encompass all artwork.  It is perhaps better to think of genre in this sense as a guide, rather than absolute law or the last word on the subject.

Examples of Genre in Writing, Music and Film

Play
(comedy, tragedy)
Poem
(epic, ode)
Speech
Letter
Novel
(graphic, romance, gothic, vampire, historic, fantasy)
Memoir

Opera
Requiem
Symphony
Punk
Heavy Metal
Hip Hop
Rap

Action
Adventure
Science Fiction
Animation
Silent
Western
Documentary
Noir
Horror