Genre is generally thought of as a classifier for different types of texts. Some genres include satire, horror, drama, romance, comedy, etc. For example, the play Romeo and Juliet is a literary work that would be classified in the tragedy genre. It is common for most to see genre as just a simple way to categorize a work. However, there are scholars who have rethought the idea of genre and believe that it is not only the categorizer, but also a reason for a social action. Anis Bawarshi and Carolyn Miller have written books on the topic of genre and explored its complexity.
Many scholars have done work on explaining how genre is not only a way to classify texts, but it is also a concept that makes people act in a certain way. Some scholars use genre to address a certain audience or to get a point across. In “Genre Function,” Bawarshi states that “[w]hen individuals communicate, they do so within genres, and so the participants in any communicative act assume certain genre-constituted roles while interacting with one another” (Bawarshi 348). Bawarshi is saying that people communicate in genres in every type of interaction. For example, a clown’s goal at a child’s birthday party would be making themselves comedic and make the other children happy. Therefore, the clown would do silly actions to achieve their goal of making the children happy. In this example, the clown’s performance is dependent upon the attitude of the children and they would need to do things to ultimately achieve this goal of theirs. Similarly, Carolyn Miller believes that there is a direct correlation between the construct of a word and its meaning. She insists that “it is constitutive rules that tell us how to fuse form and substance to make meaning and regulative rules that tell us how the fusion itself is to be interpreted within its context” (Miller 161). Miller explains that it is both the form and substance combined that make the meaning of a word. She is also saying that these two components make us act in a certain way to accommodate the perceived meaning of the word. Therefore, Miller’s argues that it is both the meaning and mood associated with a word that elicits an action in response to it.
Most people would generally think of genre as just a word that organizes literature into different categories. However, scholars have been able to rethink the term genre and have formed a new concept behind it. For example, Bawarshi believes that we all use genre whenever we communicate with one another and that these actions are relevant to the mood that we want to get across. Miller, like Bawarshi, believes that the relationship between the form and substance of a word creates a meaning to a word, which creates an action in response to it. Genre can be defined in many ways and all of them come together to form the idea of what genre is. Genre does categorize, but it also causes people to act a certain way to get an idea across.
Works Cited
Bawarshi, Anis. “The Genre Function.” College English, vol. 62, no. 3, 1 Jan. 2000, pp. 335–360. JSTOR, JSTOR.
Miller, Carolyn. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech - QUART J SPEECH. 70. 151-167. 10.1080/00335638409383686.