Genre investigation

What is genre?
Is the term for any category of literature literature or other forms of art or entertainment, e.g. music, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.

Why is genre important to audiences?

Although genres are not always precisely definable, genre considerations are one of the most important factors in determining what a person will see or read. The classification properties of genre can attract or repel potential users depending on the individual's understanding of a genre. Genre creates an expectation in that expectation is met or not. Many genres have built-in audiences and matching publications that support them, such as magazines and websites. Inversely, audiences may call out for change in a antecedent genre and create an entirely new

Why is genre important to institutions?

The producers and institutions have to know what kind of film genre they're going to produce right from the word go, so they know to get the right actors, props, set, dialogue etc. When promoting the film advertisement also tells the audience a lot about the film. For example, the SuperBad Trailer tells us about the comedy of the film. Immediately, because the distributors and film producers knew what they wanted to get across to the audience, the audience can tell what kind of film they'd see if they went to see Superbad at the movie theatre.

What genre theorists can you find?

John Hartley- Argued that genres are agents of ideological closure, they limit the meaning potential of a given text. Robert Hodge & Gunther Kress- define genres as 'typical forms of texts which link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and occasion', adding that they 'control the behaviour of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential consumers. Genres can be seen as constituting a kind of tacit contract between authors and readers. Daniel Chandler- Conventional definitions of genres tend to be based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions of content and form which are shared by the text which are regarded as belonging to them. John Fiske 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, which we would also understand intertextually, in terms of what we have seen so often on our screens. There is then a cultural knowledge of the concept 'car chase' that any one text is a prospectus for, and that it used by the viewer to decode it, and by the producer to encode it. Nicholas Abercrombie Television producers set out to exploit genre conventions... It... makes sound economic sense. Sets, properties and costumes can be used over and over again. Teams of stars, writers, directors and technicians can be built up, giving economies of scale