Genre
The genre of a text is its type or kind. It’s a word that can be applied to more than just texts, of course, with films, for example, we use terms such as the ‘Western genre’, the ‘romantic genre’, etc. But genre is much more than this.
- What is not often realised is that an analysis at the level of a text’s genre can produce easy and quick, yet interesting and subtle points of the kind that can achieve the highest marks in an exam.
- What’s needed from you with these basic terms (such as ‘genre’ but ‘context’ is another) is not so much extra or detailed knowledge from you, but a great deal of close thought and reflection. It is this that will reveal the effects of these things on both language use (i.e. from the producer of the text) and language interpretation (i.e. for the receiver of the text – its reader or listener).
A generic text is one in which the writer has followed a series of identifiable conventions applicable to its particular genre. These so-called ‘genre conventions’ are important because they are the very first thing noticed about a text and it is this which makes them potentially important. Genre – even if we don’t know or use the term – is one of those innocent-seeming everyday things that we take entirely for granted. But on this A-level course, things that are seemingly everyday and taken for granted need thought and often are worthy of close analysis because such things can act in surprisingly powerful ways to shape our understanding of the world and its ways. They can also act to maintain and reinforce what are called society’s dominant ideologies. This is an area covered in the second part of this revision guide in more detail. With regard to genre, genre conventions are important because we are all ‘conditioned’ to react to generic texts in certain ‘culturally determined’ ways. These generic aspects of texts work at a subconscious level and affect both our reception and interpretation of the text.
