genre
Semiotics for Beginners Daniel Chandler
Genre is one of the most fundamental kinds of textual code.
traditional definitions
Traditional definitions of genres tend to be based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions of content (such as themes or settings) and/or form (including structure and style) which are shared by the texts which are regarded as belonging to them.
This mode of defining a genre is deeply problematic. For instance, genres overlap and texts often exhibit the conventions of more than one genre. It is seldom hard to find texts which are exceptions to any given definition of a particular genre.
cross-media genre distinctions
An overview of genre taxonomies in various media is beyond the scope of the current text, but it is appropriate here to allude to a few key cross-media genre distinctions. The organization of public libraries suggests that one of the most fundamental contemporary genre distinctions is between fiction and non-fiction - a categorization which highlights the importance of modality judgements. Even such an apparently basic distinction is revealed to be far from straightforward as soon as one tries to apply it to the books on one's own shelves or to an evening's television viewing.
Another binary distinction is based on the kinds of language used: poetry and prose - the 'norm' being the latter, as Moli?re's Monsieur Jourdain famously discovered: 'Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it!'. Even here there are grey areas, with literary prose often being regarded as 'poetic'. This is related to the issue of how librarians, critics and academics decide what is 'literature' as opposed to mere 'fiction'.
rhetorical 'modes'
As with the typology of codes in general, no genre taxonomy can be ideologically neutral. Traditional rhetoric distinguishes between four kinds of discourse: exposition, argument, description and narration. These four forms, which relate to primary purposes, are often referred to as different genres. However, texts frequently involve any combination of these forms and they are perhaps best thought of as 'modes'.
modes of employment
More widely described as genres are the four 'modes of emplotment' which Hayden White adopted from Northrop Frye in his study of historiography: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. Useful as such interpretative frameworks can be, however, no taxonomy of textual genres adequately represents the diversity of texts.
'negotiated' definitions of genre
Despite such theoretical problems, various interpretative communities (at particular periods in time) do operate on the basis of a negotiated (if somewhat loose and fluid) consensus concerning what they regard as the primary genres relevant to their purposes.
Television listings magazines, for instance, invariably allocate genre labels to the films which they broadcast. The illustration below shows the labels used by one such British magazine (What's On TV) over several months in 1993, together with the links with each other which are implied by the nomenclature. A more basic variation on the same theme is found in the labelled sections of video rental shops.
Whilst there is far more to a genre code than that which may seem to relate to specifically textual features it can still be useful to consider the distinctive properties attributed to a genre by its users.
For instance, if we take the case of film, the textual features typically listed by theorists include:
- narrative - similar (sometimes formulaic) plots and structures, predictable situations, sequences, episodes, obstacles, conflicts and resolutions;
- characterization - similar types of characters (sometimes stereotypes), roles, personal qualities, motivations, goals, behaviour;
- basic themes, topics, subject matter (social, cultural, psychological, professional, political, sexual, moral) and values;
- setting - geographical and historical;
- iconography (echoing the narrative, characterization, themes and setting) - a familiar stock of images or motifs, the connotations of which have become fixed; primarily but not necessarily visual, including dˇcor, costume and objects, certain 'typecast' performers (some of whom may have become 'icons'), familiar patterns of dialogue, characteristic music and sounds, and appropriate physical topography; and
- filmic techniques - stylistic or formal conventions of camerawork, lighting, sound-recording, use of colour, editing etc. (viewers are often less conscious of such conventions than of those relating to content).
Some film genres tend to defined primarily by their subject matter (e.g. detective films), some by their setting (e.g. the Western) and others by their narrative form (e.g. the musical). Less easy to place in one of the traditional categories are mood and tone (which are key features of the film noir).
In addition to textual features, different genres (in any medium) also involve different purposes, pleasures, audiences, modes of involvement, styles of interpretation and text-reader relationships. A particularly important feature which tends not to figure in traditional accounts and which is often assigned to text-reader relationships rather than to textual features in contemporary accounts is mode of address, which involves inbuilt assumptions about the audience, such as that the 'ideal' viewer is male (the usual categories here are class, age, gender and ethnicity).
Semiotics for Beginners Daniel Chandler .
|
|