Blog Post 2 – What is Genre?

Before reading the chapter on Genre, I understood it as a category of literature, like fantasy, romance, Sci-Fi, etc. Defining genre as “how the speaker chooses to respond to the rhetorical situation” (18) completely changed my perspective. I now view genre as a category of response. Different circumstances warrant different genres of response. Genres function as a way to contextualize my writing and reading.

In my reading, the author’s genre is crucial to truly interpret their text. Past philosophical or political passages, for example, can not be fully weighted unless the knowledge and point of view of the author are known. When I read Marx’s work for Political Theory during my freshman year of college, I had to constantly remind myself of the political landscape of the time these works were written to further contextualize what I was reading and apply it to present examples.

In writing, my genre is more internal. It is my response, my context, rather than that of who wrote what I am reading. I am currently choosing a specific genre to write this post. I find myself in a situation where I want to meet the requirements of the assignment while also writing an interesting piece that my readers can connect to. To accomplish my goal, I chose to spread out the points I need to address for the assignment over the story I want to tell and/or the examples I wish to relay. That choice is my genre.