Where does genre collide?

In literary study, a genre is a kind of literary work grouped by shared form and convention, such as tragedy, epic, or the novel: works are sorted into genres by the features they hold in common, and a genre carries expectations about structure, tone, and subject. The idea runs from Aristotle's division of poetry into kinds through to modern schemes that try to map the whole field of writing. Northrop Frye's 1957 Anatomy of Criticism set out to organise literature into a small set of recurring modes and forms, treating genre as an ordering scheme for the entire body of literary work. Here the thing being named is a category on the page, defined by textual convention, and not a way of acting, a type of everyday speech, or a label a machine assigns to a song.[1]

Unit

A class of literary works that share form and convention

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assigned by reading a work for the formal conventions it shares with an established kind

In rhetoric and applied linguistics, a genre is not a fixed literary form but a recurring, socially shared way of getting something done with language. Carolyn Miller's 1984 Genre as Social Action argued that a genre is defined by the typified action it performs in response to a situation that keeps coming up, such as a letter of recommendation or an apology, rather than by its surface shape. John Swales's 1990 Genre Analysis studied genres as communicative events shared by a community, showing how a research article is built from a regular sequence of rhetorical moves. On this view the thing being named is a pattern of situated action, tied to a purpose and a group of users, and it can change as the situation changes. That is a very different object from a static literary category or a label pinned to an audio file.[2][3]

Unit

A typified way of acting through language in a recurring situation

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied by analysing texts for their shared rhetorical moves and the situations that recur

For the linguist and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a speech genre is one of the relatively stable types of utterance that grow up within each sphere of human activity, from a casual greeting to a military command to a scientific paper. His essay in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, written in the early 1950s and published in English in 1986, argued that we do not speak in sentences alone but in whole utterances shaped to fit a familiar type, and that we take in these types about as readily as we take in our native grammar. Genres in this usage run from short everyday exchanges to elaborate written forms, and each carries a typical content, style, and structure. The thing being named is a customary shape of speech or writing tied to a setting, close to the rhetorical view but framed as a fact about language use rather than a literary category or a classifier's tag.[4]

Unit

A relatively stable type of utterance within a sphere of use

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by observing the recurring forms of whole utterance within a domain of activity