The scope of the word "genre" is sometimes confined to art and culture, particularly literature and music, but it has a long history in rhetoric as well. In genre studies the concept of genre is not compared to originality. Rather, all works are recognized as either reflecting on or participating in the conventions of genre.
Literature, for example, is divided into three basic kinds of literature, which are the classic genres of Ancient Greece: poetry, drama, and prose. Poetry may then be subdivided into epic, lyric, and dramatic. Subdivisions of drama includes foremost comedy and tragedy, while eg. comedy itself has subgenres, including farce, comedy of manners, burlesque, satire, and so on. However, any of these terms would be called "genre", and its possible more general terms implied.
Forensic speeches are informative, aiming to establish something that happened. Deliberative speeches try to persuade an audience. Epideictic speeches praise or blame a person, value, or event. As with literary genres, there are subgenres that exist under each of these over-arching genres: apologia, funeral orations, and the after-dinner speech might be considered three sub-genres of epideictic rhetoric.
A more general term, coined by Robert A. Heinlein, is "speculative fiction," an umbrella term covering all such genres that depict alternate realities. Even fiction that depicts innovations ruled out by current scientific theory, such as stories about or based on faster-than-light travel, are still science fiction, because science is a main subject in the piece of art.
Many genres have built-in audiences and corresponding publications that support them, such as magazines and websites. Books and movies that are difficult to categorize into a genre are likely to be less successful commercially.
Some search engines like Vivsimo try to group found web pages into automated categories in an attempt to show various genres the search hits might fit.
In this sense genres are socially specified: recognized and defined (often informally) by a particular culture or community. The work of Georg Lukcs also touches on the nature of literary genres, appearing separately but around the same time (1920s–1930s) as Bakhtin. Norman Fairclough has a similar concept of genre that emphasises the social context of the text: Genres are "different ways of (inter)acting discoursally" (Fairclough, 2003: 26) However, this is just one way of conceiving genre. Charaudeau & Maingueneau determine four different analytic conceptualisations of genre.
Instead most video game genres are based on the way in which the player interacts with the game. Genres from other types of media like science-fiction or fantasy are sometimes applied to games, but rarely does this concept of genre ever supplant the types described below.
Source: Wikipedia > Genre
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