I was a student and teacher of literature, so I have many books about reading as well as about writing. Today let’s look at Ways of Reading (Montgomery, Martin, et al., 2012) which has an interesting section on genre – and I found this section in the ‘Functions of genre’ chapter particularly thought-provoking:
Genre as a framework for a text’s intelligibility
“…[G]enre forms a major dimension of the tacit knowledge, or body of interpretative assumptions and techniques, that we draw on in reading. Our expectations in reading a text are structured on many different levels, from local inferences which fill in gaps between obviously related but not continuous details through to vague assumptions about overall point or significance. Genre in this view may dictate, for example, the degree of realism to be expected from a given type of text; or it may guide responses concerning the significance of costume, character, and choice of particular ways of speaking and moving. (Our notion of what genre we are watching or reading may help us anticipate, for example, whether a hero is likely to die or not.) We might accordingly say that genre provides a detailed schema, or kind of sign-posting or textual architecture, which gives instructions about how the text is to be read.”
Later, in a section under the subheading ‘Genre as a promotional device’, there’s this line:
“Genres in this way allow audiences to predict and plan kinds of experiences for themselves, and to repeat, with local variation, kinds of pleasure or entertainment they have previously enjoyed.”
So what do you make of this?
– Is this how you see genre?
– Do you find genre distinctions useful?
– Do you think about genre in the same way as a reader and as a writer?
Head to the comments.
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