Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

4.3 Functions of genre
Unit 4 Recognizing genre
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

So far we have looked at different ways of understanding what genre is. But why should it matter whether we assign texts to types or classes, and who in fact does? To understand what functions genre serves, we need to explore how distinctions created by notions of genre fit into the larger, aesthetic and social frameworks that govern how texts are created, how they circulate and how they are evaluated (see Unit 13, Intertextuality and allusion).

The various functions that are attributed to genre, as we shall see even in the brief descriptions that follow, are problematic, resting on a major fault line within literary history. In some periods and places, it is thought a valuable achievement to produce a good ’generic text’: a pastoral ode that respects the conventions, a formulaic but clever detective thriller, or a good pop song recounting a failed relationship completely irrespective of the song-writer’s actual circumstances, for example. In other periods and places, the aspiration to write within a genre is dismissed as vacuous and imitative, lacking in imagination and individual creativity. This unresolved issue of the nature and scope of literary creativity is reflected in the various functions genre is thought to serve.

4.3.1 Genre as a framework for a text’s intelligibility

The main psychological function of genre is to act as a sort of schema, or structured set of assumptions within our tacit knowledge, that we draw on to guide reading, rather like a series of signposts or instructions. Expectations in reading are structured at many different levels, from the sorts of local inference we make in order to fill in gaps between obviously related but not continuous details through to vague assumptions about overall point or significance. Genre dictates procedures for reading at each level, signalling the general trajectory that a text is likely to be following, the amount of detail we expect it to go into at any given stage or on any topic, and the degree of realism or truthfulness it is likely to show.

4.3.2 Genre as reflecting the nature of human experience

Relating this cognitive role of genre to speculation about basic human categories of thought, some critics have suggested connections between specific genres and fundamental kinds of human experience. The distinction between tragedy and comedy is often made along these lines. One notable scheme in this area is that of archetypal genres developed by the literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-91). For Frye, four selected genres (comedy, romance, tragedy and satire) correspond emotionally to the four seasons, which are linked in turn to perceived stages of human life and a rich cultural reservoir of myth.

One problem with such a view of genre, however, is that it is likely to have little to say about the emotional functions of less traditional or less high- cultural genres: the dance mix, the performance pop-video, the Bollywood masala movie or the blog. Archetypal classifications take for granted a distinction - in itself ’generic’ - between serious or profound forms that somehow correspond to essential human experience and other, non-serious forms that are presumably less worthwhile or significant.

4.3.3 Genre as a promotional device

By comparison with the previous two functions, most other functions suggested for genre are concerned more with the social circulation of texts than with cognitive processes involved in interpreting them. Sometimes genre provides structure, for instance, in classification systems used to identify a textual product range or locate texts in a given market. In this context, genre signals an appeal to different audience tastes and wishes (for news, for the problemsolving pleasure of detective fiction, for a story to make you cry, etc.). Genres allow audiences to predict and plan kinds of experience for themselves, and to repeat, with local variation, kinds of pleasure or entertainment they have previously enjoyed. TV scheduling displays this type of thinking (indeed, the vocabulary of media scheduling consists largely of such classification). Genre categories then feed back to ’content providers’, or text producers, who can work to genre expectations in order to fill a given market niche and respond to known audience tastes.

4.3.4 Genre as a way of controlling markets and audiences

This view of the usefulness of genre categories overlaps with the last; but it extends it, with the idea that genres do not so much reflect audience wishes as create them. Genres in this view are part of a process of controlling the production of entertainment and directing culture markets, by actively repeating the formula of whatever has already been successful. Saturating media space with texts created according to proven formulae allows confident investment in production; but to many people this use of genre as a set of planning categories represents a kind of conspiracy, bringing about a detrimental standardization of cultural products into predictable forms. (The financing of Hollywood films, with notable exceptions, is often argued to follow this pattern.)