Abstract
This chapter stresses that genre has remained a central reference point within media studies, in contrast to authorship, that mainstay of critical post-war writing in film and media studies. Though the applications are wider, both authorship and genre were concepts developed and refined largely in relation to commercial, typically Hollywood, cinema. Both are equally concerned with patterns of continuity and discontinuity and both, it can be argued, are premised on an impossible idea of knowledge. Yet the impossibility of genre—how can a particular genre ever be fully known or defined?—has impacted its continuing use in the way that we see happening with the impossibility of authorship. This chapter seeks to explore why that might be the case, revisiting some key 1960s Anglophone writings on genre in order to reflect on the continuing resonance of genre as a category. Whether implicitly or explicitly, it contrasts the range of action as a generic space to more limited categories defined by subject matter or iconography. Reflecting on what is implicit in this work on action, and reading this through key early writings on genre, it raises questions about the flexibility of genre as a concept. Given its very extensiveness, it uses action film and television as a test case for exploring both the impossibility and the value of genre as a concept for contemporary critical analysis of media texts.
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Notes
- 1.
See chapter “Trespass: Genre, Author, and Play in the Discourse of Media Aesthetics” by Ivo Ritzer in this volume.
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Tasker, Y. (2021). Genre in Action: The Impossibility and Value of Genre Analysis. In: Ritzer, I. (eds) Media and Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69866-9_2
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