AN INTRODUCTION TO GENRE THEORY
Keywords:
boundaries, genres, shifting, permeable, Abercrombie, steady, dismantling genre, new audiences, the dynamic fluidity, the final demise, interpretive, framework.Abstract
How we define a genre depends on our purposes; the adequacy of our definition in terms of social science at least must surely be related to the light that the exploration sheds on the phenomenon. For instance (and this is a key concern of mine), if we are studying the way in which genre frames the reader's interpretation of a text then we would do well to focus on how readers identify genres rather than on theoretical distinctions. Defining genres may be problematic, but even if theorists were to abandon the concept, in everyday life people would continue to categorize texts.
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