Genre
Context (What else is this connected to?)
Genre
0.0 MARY: And now to our last context concept, “Genre.” If association is how meanings fit with each other, genre is how they are similar to each other.
Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 181-83.
0.22 MARY: Here is a still from Sergei Bondarchuk’s movie, “War and Peace” of 1967. The movie is based on Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel of the same name. Historical movies are a genre, and so are historical novels. Genres are meaning artifacts and events that are in some ways similar to each other. In fact, to some degree, in their making they are modelled on each other, by design.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 183-87.
0.51 MARY: Here are some examples of genres across our different forms of meaning. An interview is a kind of conversation. Punk rock is a kind of music. Women have a kind of bodily appearance - though of course, in the era of gender fluidity, this is a gross generalization, which is why we prefer the hybridized word “gendre.” Forks are a kind of eating utensil. Kitchens are a kind of room. Photographs are a kind of image. Software code is a kind of writing. And of course, within genres there are sub-genres.
Going back to our notion of design, no two interviews are exactly the same, no two punk rock songs, no two people’s bodily expression of gendre, no two forks, no two kitchens, no two photographs, no two pieces of software code. Yet they are defined by their patterns of similarity.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 182.