Genre

Definitions
1. Genre is a term used to classify types of spoken or written discourse. These are normally
classified by content, language, purpose and form.
2. Genre is the organization of literature into categories based on the type of writing the
piece exemplifies through its content, form, or style.
3. Genre is a social action and a speech eventthat has communicative goal shared by the
members of a particular discourse community.
4. According to Swales (1990:58): “A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the
members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are
recognised by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby
constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the
genre and influences and constraints choice of content and style *…+ In addition to
purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure,
style, content and intended audience”.
Example
Learners analyse an example of a formal letter of complaint, looking at structure, set phrases,
formality and purpose. They identify the key elements of this genre then produce their own
examples based on this data.
In the classroom
Written genres that learners deal with in class include reports, news articles, letters of enquiry,
stories, invitations, e-mails and poems. Spoken genres include presentations, speeches,
interviews and informal conversation.

Introduction
Genre (from French genre 'kind, sort') is any form or type of communication in any mode
(written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over
time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art
or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic
criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by
conventions that change over time as cultures invent new genres and discontinue the use of old
ones. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these
conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles,
but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions.
Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great
flexibility.

Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature, as set out
in Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, poetry (odes, epics, etc.), prose, and performance each had
specific design features that supported appropriate content of each genre. Speech patterns for
comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, for example, and even actors were restricted to
their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best.

Genres proliferate and develop beyond Aristotle’s classifications in response to changes in

audiences and creators.[4] Genre has become a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of
unpredictability through artistic expression. Given that art is often a response to a social state, in
that people write, paint, sing, dance, and otherwise produce art about what they know about, the
use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings.

Genre suffers from the ills of any classification system. Musician Ezra LaFleur argues that
discussion of genre should draw from Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance. Genres
are helpful labels for communicating but do not necessarily have a single attribute that is the
essence of the genre.

Genre in Linguistics
In philosophy of language, genre figures prominently in the works of philosopher and literary
scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's basic observations were of "speech genres" (the idea
of heteroglossia), modes of speaking or writing that people learn to mimic, weave together, and
manipulate (such as "formal letter" and "grocery list", or "university lecture" and "personal
anecdote"). In this sense, genres are socially specified: recognized and defined (often informally)
by a particular culture or community. The work of Georg Lukács also touches on the nature
of literary genres, appearing separately but around the same time (1920s–1930s) as
Bakhtin. Norman Fairclough has a similar concept of genre that emphasizes the social context of
the text: Genres are "different ways of (inter)acting discoursally" (Fairclough, 2003: 26).

A text's genre may be determined by its:

1. Linguistic function.
2. Formal traits.
3. Textual organization.
4. Relation of communicative situation to formal and organizational traits of the text
(Charaudeau and Maingueneau, 2002:278–280).

History
This concept of genre originated from the classification systems created by Plato. Plato
divided literature into the three classic genres accepted in Ancient Greece: poetry, drama,
and prose. Poetry is further subdivided into epic, lyric, and drama. The divisions are recognized
as being set by Aristotle and Plato; however, they were not the only ones. Many genre theorists
added to these accepted forms of poetry.

Classical and Romance genre theory

The earliest recorded systems of genre in Western history can be traced back
to Plato and Aristotle. Gérard Genette explains his interpretation of the history of genre in "The
Architext". He described Plato as the creator of three imitational, mimetic genres distinguished
by mode of imitation rather than content. These three imitational genres include dramatic
dialogue, the drama; pure narrative, the dithyramb; and a mixture of the two, the epic. Plato
excluded lyric poetry as a non-mimetic, imitational mode. Genette further discussed how
Aristotle revised Plato's system by first eliminating the pure narrative as a viable mode. He then
uses two additional criteria to distinguish the system. The first of the criteria is the object to be
imitated, whether superior or inferior. The second criterion is the medium of presentation: words,
gestures, or verse. Essentially, the three categories of mode, object, and medium can be
visualized along an XYZ axis. Excluding the criteria of medium, Aristotle's system distinguished
four types of classical genres: tragedy, epic, comedy, and parody.
Genette explained the integration of lyric poetry into the classical system by replacing the
removed pure narrative mode. Lyric poetry, once considered non-mimetic, was deemed to
imitate feelings, becoming the third "Architext", a term coined by Gennette, of a new long-
enduring tripartite system: lyrical; epical, the mixed narrative; and dramatic, the dialogue. This
new system that came to "dominate all the literary theory of German romanticism" (Genette 38)
has seen numerous attempts at expansion and revision. Such attempts include Friedrich
Schlegel's triad of subjective form, the lyric; objective form, the dramatic; and subjective-
objective form, the epic. However, more ambitious efforts to expand the tripartite system
resulted in new taxonomic systems of increasing complexity. Gennette reflected upon these
various systems, comparing them to the original tripartite arrangement: "its structure is
somewhat superior to most of those that have come after, fundamentally flawed as they are by
their inclusive and hierarchical taxonomy, which each time immediately brings the whole game
to a standstill and produces an impasse".

Purpose of Genre Analysis

Genre Analysis is a process of looking at several samples of a particular genre to analyze their
similarities and differences in terms of their purposes, macrostructure and language choice.
Before we explain genre analysis, it is important to understand what genre is. Genre refers to
categories of texts that share the same features: they are organised and worded in a similar way
for the same audience and with the same purpose. Poems, news articles and lab reports are all
different genres of writing. Genres are not limited to written texts.
For example, horror films are a genre. Horror novels belong to the same genre as horror films
because they share similar organization and language, the same audience and have the same
purpose…to scare you.
An essay on a horror film, however, is a different genre because it has a different audience
(academic) and a different purpose (to educate/inform) than the film or novel.
So, genre analysis is the ability to identify a genre’s defining organization, language, intended
audience and purpose.
There are various ideas of what genre analysis should do. One view is that genre analysis
identifies typical patterns of speaking practice and investigates their systematic relation to
aspects of the social structure. This idea is rather more structuralist than a similar but
conservative view that suggests genre analysis identifies how linguistic features are chosen by
expert users of the genre such that it accomplishes their communicative purpose and, further,
explains the social and psychological context of these choices. Whereas the first notion sees
genre analysis foregrounding social determinants, the second emphasises the primacy of the
genre community.
In similar vein, it is suggested that the aim of genre analysis is to investigate the social and
linguistic conventions associated with a particular genre.
Initially, genre analysis tended towards linguistic description of specific genres. With more input
from sociology and other disciplines, this shifted, as Bhatia (1993) showed and advocated, 'from
mere surface oriented pure linguistic description to a deeper functional explanation of
genres' (Nielsen, 1997, p. 208), in short from thin description to thick description. 'Thus the main
goal of genre analysis is not to find out how genres are written but why they are written the way
they are' (Nielsen, 1997, pp. 208–09).