Blue/Purple Topic: Genre part 2 - Retread or Subversion?

[ladyseishou]

Apparently, many of our Nano Writers (whether of the blue or purple persuasion) have a passionate interest in the topic of genre and my thanks to everyone who commented on the earlier post!

What exactly genre means is open to a degree of interpretation…



As lassarina and everchangingmuse unfortunately discovered, many academic programs consider genre to be synonymous with formulaic writing. As Janet Burroway points out in her text Writing Fiction:

…teachers of fiction writing [believe]…that whereas writing literary fiction can teach you how to write good genre fiction, writing genre fiction does not teach you how to write good literary fiction – does not, in effect, teach you… how to be original and meaningful in words.

Leaving aside debate as to the merit of this viewpoint momentarily, there is also the meaning of genre that syderia points out when she says: “genre is mostly a useful way for bookstores and libraries to know where to put your book.”

Related closely to this definition of genre is the idea of fiction that is written to satisfy or entertain a particular group of readers or as Janet Burroway says:

Literary fiction differs from genre fiction fundamentally in the fact that the former is character-driven, the latter plot-driven. There is a strong tendency – though it is not a binding rule – of genre fiction to imply that life is fair, and to let the hero or heroine, after a great struggle, win out in the end; and of literary fiction to posit that life is not fair, that triumph is partial, happiness tentative, and that the heroine and hero are subject to mortality. Literary fiction also strives to reveal its meaning through the creation of unexpected or unusual characters, through patterns of action and turns of event that will surprise the reader. Genre fiction, on the other hand, tends to develop character stereotypes and set patterns of action that become part of the expectation, the demand, and the pleasure of the readers of that genre.

Historically, it is interesting to further consider Ms. Burroway’s theory of the origins of specific genres as several Nano Writers wrote about their preference for a specific genre (or subgenre):

…most genres have developed from a kind of fiction that was at one time mainstream and represented a major social problem or concern. Early romance, for example, dealt with the serious question of how a woman was to satisfy the need for both stability and love in married life, how to be both independent and secure in a society with rigid sexual roles. The detective story evolved simultaneously with widespread and intense interest in science, an optimistic expectation that violence and mystery could be rationally explained. The western dealt with the ambivalence felt by large numbers of westward-traveling Euro-Americans about the civilizing of the wilderness, the desire to rid the West of its brutality, the fear that “taming” it would also destroy its promise of solitude and freedom. Science fiction, the most recently developed and still developing genre, similarly deals with ambivalence about technology, the near-miraculous accomplishments of the human race through science, the dangers to human feeling, soul, and environment. The surge in popularity of fantasy fiction can probably be attributed to nostalgia for a time even more free of technological accomplishment and threat, since fantasy employs a medieval setting and solves problems through magic, whereas science fiction is set in the future and solves problems through intelligence and technology. It is relevant that science fiction usually deals with some problem that can be seen to have a counterpart in the contemporary culture (space travel, international or interplanetary intrigue, mechanical replacement of body parts, genetic manipulation), whereas the plots of fantasies tend to deal with obsolete or archaic traumas – wicked overlords, demon interlopers, and so forth.

Perhaps the best way to approach genre is as Nano Writers lassarina and shiromirai and manyworlds advise: write what you will, tell your story with your ideas, and use genre as a tool or technique or as Alex Garland (The Beach, The Tesseract) refers to genre, as a “free gift.”

I love genre. I like watching it and I like reading it and I like working within it. From the point of view of work, I think genre’s a kind of free gift. It gives you all sorts of things you can subvert and if you’re unsure about where you’re going with something, genre will tell you where to go and if nothing else, what genre can do is it can provide you with a structure. I think that you then are likely to end up subverting it, really just to keep yourself entertained because otherwise you will just be retreading stuff that other people have done a lot before and probably more successfully than you’re doing, as well.

Subversion of genre, as Mr. Garland mentions is also a popular use of genre or as manyworlds points out: “I like fiction that takes genre conventions and turns them on their heads.” Novelist Patricia Duncker (Hallucinating Foucault, Miss Webster and Chérif) also speaks of this kind of “playful” use of genre in her writing:

Thinking in terms of genre is important because writing within something that’s immediately recognizable, you raise certain sorts of expectations in the reader, and you need to know what you’re doing with those expectations. So whilst I would say, I’m not a genre writer, I write with a very intense awareness of genre, because it’s something that I want to play with, it’s something I want to have fun with. The book that I’ve just brought out is a book called Seven Tales of Sex and Death, and the genre that influenced that book were the late-night B movies in France that I enjoy watching. And most of those are very violent, they’re horror movies. And that particular genre had its own laws, its own traditions in a way, its own traditions of badness to some extent, because it was packed with really lurid clichés. But I became interested in the lurid clichés.

Tomorrow, a challenge! How well do you know your genre, Nano Writer? Until then, keep writing!

Bibliography

Burroway, Janet. Writing fiction a guide to narrative craft. New York: Longman, 2003.

OpenLearn - The Open University. 30 May 2009 <http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=169793>.