a style or category of art, music, or literature.
The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers. Since it is also a practical device for enabling individual media users to plan their choices, it can be considered as a mechanism for ordering the relations between the two main parties to mass communication.
Dennis McQuail 1987, p. 200
Genre rests around a relationship surrounding similarities and differences. Genre’s are really important for institutions and audiences.
. . . saddled with conventions and stereotypes, formulas and
Scorcese, A personal Journey through American Cinema (1995)
clichés and all of these limitations were codified in specific genres. This was the very foundation of the studio system and audiences love genre pictures . . .
Institutions can become genres in themselves.
| Steve Neale | Neale believes that films of a type (genre, like romance or horror) should include features that are similar, so the audience know it is a horror film or romance, but also include features that are different, to keep an audience interested. This is his theory of repetition and difference. |
| predictable expectations | expectations that others have too that are set before and also throughout reading a book, watching a film or listening to a song. |
| reinforced | |
| amplify | |
| repertoire of elements | the repetition of components that make up the ‘body’ of similar texts – corpus. |
| corpus | body of similar texts. |
| verisimilitude | |
| realism | |
| construction of reality | |
| historically specific | |
| sub-genres | |
| hybrid genres | |
| different | |
| familiar |