Concept of Genre (Lecture)
From Screenpedia
Definition problem
Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942):[1]
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into
- belonging to the Emperor
- embalmed
- trained
- piglets
- sirens
- fabulous
- stray dogs
- included in this classification
- trembling like crazy
- innumerables
- drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
- et cetera
- just broke the vase
- from a distance look like flies
- Andrew Tudor: "empiricist dilemma"[2]
- "To take a genre such as the 'western', analyse it, and list its principal characteristics, is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of films which are 'westerns'. But they can only be isolated on the basis of the 'principal characteristics' which can only be discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated."[2]
- Tudor's solution: "common cultural consensus"[2]
- Rely on presumed consensus: "genre is what we collectively believe it to be."[2]
- Working definition uses both approaches
- Validated by films themselves
- Critical purpose
- A priori criteria
- Ways of defining genres
- Audience response
- Style -- the how rather than the what
- Subject matter (i.e., content)
- Narrative structure
- Theme
