Journal 4: Magen Mack

Genre 

Genre is essential in both creating and reading texts. For Devitt, text is a very fluid medium. Genres can encapsulate seemingly unrelated things as a part of a larger whole. Genre also functions to create a sort of template for texts. Someone that writes mystery novels is not going to create a text the same way that someone who writes blogposts is going to write a text. Overall, genres function as movable borders that create communities. The existence of genres can also be confining. Knowing what is “standard” for a text is just as important as unique elements. Often the best new texts are somewhere between those things. Hamilton is a great example of this balance. The text includes a lot of what is usually sorted into the genre of ‘musicals’, but it incorporates elements that are not traditionally attributed to that genre. 

Audience is also a very important consideration when creating texts within a certain genre.  Often writers will write within very strict genre conventions for the sole purpose of being popular with a certain audience. This is more destructive to creativity than anything else.  Something interesting about audience is the new interrelation of creator and reader in modern mediums. Going back to a reading from Edbauer, there is a new ecology surrounding text distribution and audience interaction.  The digital age and its rapid pace have changed how authors and readers interact across texts. Genres are very impacted by this interaction. Knowing someone can comment back on a blogpost or YouTube video changes how the genre functions. That exchange blurs the line between author and reader by creating more of an open dialogue. It becomes another convention of those genres. This bleeds into the circulation and distribution of texts.

 Genre changes how people interact with texts both physically and mentally. People will approach a newspaper differently than an online article, even if they are from the same place. There is a difference in the speed of circulation amongst genres as well. Breaking news is often going to be circulated faster than a poem or a novel. That brings up an interesting case between text genres and necessity.