Digital Lecture on Genre

You’re probably most familiar with “genre” in terms of kinds of books or movies: sci-fi, action, romance, comedy, horror, thriller, etc. When you know the genre of a book or movie, you make assumptions about what the story will be like, what kinds of things it will or will not contain, and whether or not you will like it. A lot of these assumptions will be correct! If you’ve ever thought, “Oh, I bet they’ll get together at the end” or “Oh, I bet he’s the bad guy,” you’re already doing genre analysis.

A genre is a type of writing, defined by certain rules, norms, patterns, or expectations. Genre shapes content, but it doesn’t determine content. Writers have lots of room to play around and be creative within a given genre, and tell the story they want to tell. If they break too many of the norms/patterns for their genre, their story might be called “genre-bending” or just be classified as a different genre entirely. I might say that the Mandalorian is genre-bending, because it’s technically science fiction (it takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and there are spaceships), but it’s also a Western (Mando is basically a space cowboy who travels around to different remote settlements and helps them out with stuff). People might also say that a story “redefines the genre.” For example, most British/American fantasy is heavily influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. And a lot of paranormal romance is influenced by Stephenie Meyer and Twilight.

Parodies sometime use the norms/expectations of a genre to make fun of that same genre by subverting them in some way– Scream makes fun of horror movies, The Last Action Hero makes fun of action movies, Deadpool makes fun of superhero movies, etc. They belong to those genres, but they’re also commenting on them/joking about them.

Okay, now to move away from literary/fictional genres.

These same principles apply to other kinds of writing– in fact, basically EVERY other kind of writing.

Here are some genres I’ve used in communicating with you so far:

Syllabus
Calendar
Email
Survey
Comments-on-assignment

And here are some other genres I’ve read or written so far today:

News article
Tweet
Facebook post
Text message
To-do list
Weather alert
Review of a product

Your ability to interpret what I’ve communicated to you is partially dependent on your familiarity with these genres. You know how to read a calendar. Since most if not all of you are entering your second (or later) semester of college, you will have seen college-style syllabuses before. You know at least a little bit about how to navigate them and what kinds of information you can expect to find there.

The rules of genres are not always clear. If you’ve ever been anxious about sending an email because you’re not sure if it’s formal enough, or polite enough, or too friendly, or not friendly enough, that’s genre anxiety!

How do you know if something is a genre? Is “non-fiction” a genre? If “romance” is a genre, is “paranormal romance” a genre, or a subgenre? A Buzzfeed article and a New York Times article are usually very different, but they’re both news. Are they the same genre, or different genres? Can something belong to multiple genres at the same time?

There isn’t any one answer to these questions. We could probably argue about any of them for a long time! In this class, I’m not worried about technicalities of what counts as a genre. But just about anything we write, we’re not writing from scratch (even if we are starting with a blank page), because we already have other people’s genre expectations to work with.

For example, when I sat down to write our syllabus, I didn’t start with the question of “What even is a syllabus? What should I include on it?” I already knew what types of things it needed to contain. I just had to decide on the organization, the formatting, and the actual content. For example, the genre of syllabus tells me I need to have a grading policy, but I still have to decide what MY grading policy will be and how I want to communicate it to you.

The better you are at genre analysis in general, the easier it will be to write things you’ve never written before.

Here are some genres we will write in in this class: