Genre’s Normative Function

A screenshot of Spotify's genre page.

February 10, 2025

genre rhetoric film

I haven’t read anything particulary link-roundup-worthy this week. But I have been working in my zettelkasten system a bit. So, instead of links, I’ll post some thoughts I’ve been writing notes about.

A definition.

You can read my earlier post about genre for more theory, but I explain genre to my students like this: genres are types of communication with particular conventions expected by audiences. There’s lots more to talk about, but that’s the common denominator.

This post builds on that basic definition with three ideas:

  1. There has pretty much always been a debate about whether genre-thinking and its effects are positive or negative.
  2. Different disciplines lean more positive or more critical in terms of genre and its effects, though they’re usually more optimistic by default.
  3. Given the absolutely devastated landscape of public discourse, and more critical attitude to how we can sometimes be used by genres may be useful.

These thoughts will be brief and unproven. I’m just tossing some thoughts around, really.

Point one.

The debate about genre’s effects on freedom and possibility extend back to tensions between dialectic (philosophy) and rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Plato, for example, saw genre leading communicators toward repetitive practices, emptying the possibilities for truth-seeking. Alternatively, rhetoricians like Isocrates believed that mastering the genres of communication was both art and public education and cultural continuity. Think of it this way: Plato saw genres as cultural mad libs that cut off your ability to think. Isocrates saw them as communication tools that help audiences understand what you’re talking about. These metaphors are extremely reductive. But they’re not wrong.

Point two.

Today, rhetorical studies and the fields associated with it understandably lean more toward the latter perspective. As we worked to refine and define the term for our purposes rather than those of other fields, the “social view” was emphasized. The social view extends Isocrates’s point that we use genres to do things. These things may not always be positive, but its usually assumed that human beings are using genres, and not the other way around. The social view isn’t unique to rhetoric, it’s well explored in other disciplines like film studies, too.

Point three.

However, film studies has arguably been more attentive to the economic, industry-based, and market-incentivized nature of the production, circulation, and consumption of genre than rhetorical studies. This is pretty natural, for a few reasons. Film studies has more narrow focus (the film industry), with relatively fewer texts (films) presented in relatively small set of genres (the film genres). By contrast, rhetorical studies since its foundation has claimed an infinite focus (see Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as a meta-discipline), a seemingly infinite possible selection of texts, presented in a seemingly infinite possible selection of genres. This wide berth, to be sure, fostered a compellingly wide set of topics for rhetorical scholarship. But they also don’t give us a “central location” to analyze things like the market production of genres and their conventions.

I think writing and communication genres, especially those that are highly-incentivized by market forces and with a strong possibility for audience capture, could be considered in more critical ways. Here a few questions I’m thinking about to close the post:

None of this should absolve individuals from creating harmful content (human agency is still there of course) but more thinking about the normative, repetive aspects of genre seem kind of important at present. Maybe we need just a little bit more Plato and just a little bit less Isocrates?