Genres as Genes: Cross-Pollinating and Editing
A reflection on the pervasiveness and importance of genres to good communication
In today’s post, I want to reflect a bit on the nature of genres. By so doing, I hope to draw your attention to the pervasiveness of genres and to their importance for good communication.
Most people when they hear the word “genre” think of something literary or cinematic. Consider the many different genres of films on Netflix or Amazon. Looking for an arthouse black comedy? A musical thriller? A biographical historical drama? The website Netflix-Codes.com has a list of all the many Netflix genres you can browse to, including animal tales, classic musical comedy, Dutch movies, Korean TV shows, and so on.
Etymologically speaking, genre comes from the French genre (think of me pronouncing that in my best Alex Trebek voice), which means “kind, sort, style.” “Gender,” in turn, comes from the Old French gendre, genre “kind, species; character; gender.”
It’s not too much of a stretch to see the etymological ties between genre, “genus,” “genera,” and “gene.”
A genre is something you can start with when you open your mouth to speak or set your hands onto a keyboard to type. The genre precedes your speaking as assuredly as your DNA precedes your growth and development as an infant. If your task is to communicate well, and if all communication involves genres, then why not set yourself up for a good start and understand the genre you want to communicate in?
Genres, Relationships, and Media
The wonderfully obscure Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about speech genres. He helps us to see how genres transcend films and books; all speech falls into some sort of genre, which in turn has its own expectations, constraints, and tacit rules for how you ought to communicate. In this regard, speech genres very closely relate to the rhetorical concept of decorum, which is essentially that which your audience finds appropriate in any given circumstance.
Bakhtin includes the following as speech genres: “greetings, farewells, congratulations, all kinds of wishes, information about health, business, and so forth.” These genres seem rather mundane, but that’s the point. Speech genres are everywhere. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that without them, we’d be unable to communicate at all.
One of my favorite speech genres to introduce students to is the “supervisor meets subordinate in the elevator” speech genre. What do you say on that short trip from the first floor to the third? Relatedly, there’s the “supervisor runs into subordinate in the bathroom” speech genre, which also has its own peculiarities and ritual gestures. A handshake works in many places, but it’s not the greatest idea in the bathroom.
You see, speech genres oftentimes reflect the types of relationships that we’re in (e.g., supervisor and subordinate, husband and wife, etc.). Some genres disappear after the relationship changes or dissolves. For example, there’s a certain speech genre that only occurs for a brief period of time when a couple is dating, namely, the goodnight text. Who is the master of the goodnight text? Have you learned the art of the goodnight text? Do they teach you that in school? Have you learned when it is appropriate to send a kissy face emoji as opposed to a string of hearts?
You see, the genre signifies the type of relationship we’re in. When relationships change, genres may disappear. Put otherwise, genres transform with the relationships themselves. After a couple marries, unless a spouse is traveling, they don’t need to exchange goodnight texts. The genre has become unnecessary.
New technology ushers in new genres, too. Without the smartphone, the “goodnight text” is not a thing. You might instead have a goodnight phone call. In terms of more contemporary technology, ChatGPT has brought the “prompt” to the forefront of consciousness. Books on “prompt engineering” have also appeared with the advent of ChatGPT and generative AI. With the introduction of new genres comes the possibility for new artifacts in those genres.
With Instagram, you’ve got the landscape photo, #ThrowbackThursday, shots of your kids, etc. With YouTube, you’ve got the obligatory “Please like and subscribe” request, the how-to video, the dangerous/wild short clip (e.g., the person scaling a building with no equipment), etc. With Substack, you have a strange animal: an emailed blog post, almost like an encyclical letter meets a journal. New media imply new speech genres.
Bakhtin explains that speech genres serve as “external template[s]” for individuals and artist-craftsmen. They cut down on the amount of thinking you have to do. Are you in charge of running an ad campaign for your company? Have you considered the full array of templates at your disposal already at work in the community that you’re attempting to communicate with? Have you realized yet that without speech genres, communication would be impossible?
Try and think of some sort of communicative utterance, literary or mundane, high culture or low culture, public or private, that does not involve a genre. I’ll wait.
Bakhtin reminds us that even Shakespeare constructed works “out of forms that were already heavily laden with meaning”—forms embedded in everyday language, theatre-spectacle genres, and plots stretching back to antiquity.
You can bet that if Shakespeare were still alive his young lovers would be sending goodnight texts to one another.
Genres to Build With
The reason you ought to study and learn more about speech genres is twofold. First, it will make you more aware about the world you’re living in and the relationships you’re a part of. Second, it will make you a better communicator. Understanding how to relate to your audience and their expectations will enhance your communication.
The screenwriting guru Robert McKee explains in his book Story:
“While scholars dispute definitions and systems, the audience is already a genre expert. It enters each film armed with a complex set of anticipations learned through a lifetime of moviegoing. The genre sophistication of filmgoers presents the writer with this critical challenge: He must not only fulfill audience anticipations, or risk their confusion and disappointment, but he must lead their expectations to fresh, unexpected moments, or risk boring them. This two-handed trick is impossible without a knowledge of genre that surpasses the audience’s.”
You could easily swap out “film” with “print advertisement” or “marketing email” and the meaning would remain the same. Your audience has already experienced (and continues to experience) dozens of hundreds of thousands of communications from businesses.
After the quote above, McKee goes on to list a number of different genres (and subgenres): love story (buddy salvation), horror film (uncanny, supernatural, super-uncanny), modern epic, Western, war (pro-war vs. antiwar), maturation, redemption, punitive, testing, education, disillusionment, comedy (parody, satire, sitcom, romantic, screwball, farce, black comedy), etc.
If you’re a small business owner and your target demographic happens to be 50-to-70 year old men wealthy enough to own a second home and who play golf on a regular basis, then it would behoove you to structure your promotional materials around speech genres that would appeal to those types of people (i.e., 19th hole banter, the exploding golf ball gag, etc.).
Genres contain tropes, or anticipated turns in the communicative performance or artifact. To reiterate, genres and their associated tropes are like shared templates that we use all the time to construct communicative artifacts, whether speeches or novels or films or advertisements.
For example, Westerns have a trope wherein a stranger shows up in town. Another trope is the shootout at high noon. It is a cliché, of course. To say that a Western has a cliché in it is not to disparage it. Language (and its various manifestations, verbal or nonverbal) builds and grows on clichés. The icon is a cliché. And so is the meme. The meme takes an icon and remixes it. The remix as a genre is built upon the creative utilization of clichés.
If you want a gigantic rabbit hole to go down, treat yourself to the following advertising and news tropes. Or just visit TVTropes.org to discover an extraordinary amount of tropes that we simply take for granted.
A good plot for a movie or a book or an advertisement is always a trope or cliché with a twist, a combination of what we already know with what we never saw coming. Indeed, such expectation mixed with novelty amounts to what Kenneth Burke would define as form: the creation and satisfaction of an appetite. Genres have created appetites for us, but the question is how we work with the genre (the genes, if you will) to make something new.
If genres are like plants, then we can cross-pollinate to create new species. We can also edit the genes of these genres by altering the tropes contained within them. Walker Percy’s existential quiz is a twist on the self-help genre. It is a type of self-help parody, a genre that is still very ripe with potential. Marshall McLuhan’s City as Classroom is a type of a travel guide for postmodern man, a set of instructions for exploring the world you’re already living in. Inception is perhaps one of the greatest movies made in the last 20 years. It is a reverse-heist film. The goal is not to steal but to plant something. Whether cinematic or literary, these examples demonstrate the power of cross-pollination and genre-editing.
Bakhtin indicates that different genres afford more or less room for creativity and individual experimentation. Bakhtin writes,
“The author’s quests for his own word are basically quests for genre and style, quests for an authorial position.”
Email signatures and autoresponders afford less room for creativity than other types of genres. You need to be careful freestyling and making jokes in your out of office reply. In general, corporate speech genres do not admit as much room for individuality to peep through. Altogether, then, the question is: How will you use your understanding of genres and the tropes they contain to come up with something new, whether in your personal or private life, for fun or for profit?
Thanks for reading. If you think others might find this interesting or thought-provoking, why not share it with them? And also, why not leave a comment or a question or a provocation below? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about genres, especially novel ones that you’ve come across in your interpersonal interactions, in film/literature, or even in the corporate world. As an aside, all of the references to Bakhtin above come from Speech Genres and Other Late Essays.