Year 13: Media Studies

Monday 19th March 2012

Lesson
objective
Have I learnt
genre theories?

Describe what it feels

like to be in a car

John FISKE

American Professor of Communication Arts, 2000s

A representation of a car chase only makes sense in relation to all the others we have seen - after all, we are unlikely to
have experienced one in reality, and if we did, we would, according to this model, make sense of it by turning it into
another text, which we would also understand intertextually, in terms of what we have seen so often on our screens. There
is then a cultural knowledge of the concept 'car chase' that any one text is a prospectus for, and that is used by the
viewer to decode it, and by the producer
to encode it. (Fiske 1987, 115)

What does Fiske mean?

A scene from the
Hollywood film The
Day After Tomorrow

What does Fiske mean?

A real image of
people fleeing the
dust cloud in the
aftermath of 9/11

What does Fiske mean?

You have not been in a car chase
Or experienced a natural disaster
However, your experiences of what

you have seen on screen allow you

to imagine what it may feel like.

Theories of Genre

Jacques DERRIDA
French philosopher

Jacques Derrida proposed that

'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without...

a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres,
there is no genreless text'
(Derrida 1981, 61).

Theories of Genre

Jacques DERRIDA
French philosopher

Derridas point helps to explain

why commentators on September
11th could only understand what
they were seeing as like a
movie. This is perhaps what
Fiske means by saying we make
sense of it by turning it into
another text.

Compare this to what Fiske says about never

having experienced a car chase. If we
encounter a real-life genre experience, the
decoding system in our brains becomes
confused.

Theories of Genre

Claude LEVI-STRAUSS
French structuralist, 1970s

Levi-Strauss developed the concept of bricolage

Levi-Strauss saw any text as constructed out of
socially recognisable debris from other texts.
He saw that writers construct texts from other texts
by a process of:
Addition
Deletion
Substitution
Transposition

Theories of Genre

Gerard GENETTE
French structuralist, 1990s

Genette developed the term transtextuality and

developed five sub-groups, but only 4 apply to film:
intertextuality quotation, plagiarism, allusion
architextuality designation of the text as part of a genre by
the writer or by the audience

metatextuality explicit or implicit critical commentary of

one text on another text
hypotextuality the relation between a text and a
preceeding hypotext - a text or genre on which
it is based but which it transforms, modifies,
elaborates or extends (including parody,
spoof, sequel, translation)

Can you think of films with this example?