 You know that moment when you're watching a movie and it's been really captivating and you're getting interested in the characters and a little bit lost in the story? When something shifts and you can sense what might happen next, well in those moments you might be experiencing what it's like to recognize genre. And genre is a term frequently used to define the elements that repeat themselves in similar kinds of movies, books, television shows, music, and more. I like to define genre or genre or genre? Gen? Let's just go with the genre. Genre is what some might call typified rhetorical action. And what that means is that there are features that repeat again and again over time with few differences, in part because audiences expect certain things to happen or because they want certain kinds of experiences. Genre is the name we use to describe the categories that have developed over time for what we read, what we watch, and what we listen to. And the kinds of genre that exist in one culture at one time may not exist in another culture at another time. They're constantly changing. Now the main kinds of literary genre that you might want to be familiar with are fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. But those are the biggest categories that we can think of, really. For example, nonfiction encompasses everything from a memoir to a biography to an instruction manual. All are kinds of nonfiction writing. The only thing that ties them together is that they're not made up. And the same is true for fiction and poetry too. And when we read poetry or prose fiction, we, as the audience, have some expectations as to what should be included. That is, when we read fiction, we expect the narrative to be made up. And when we read poetry, we expect that each line of a poem match with other lines in a particular way, or it might rhyme in the manner of a sonnet, or it might break rules of punctuation, or it might simply take us through a lot of figurative language in a very short amount of time. But those are the big genre categories. Genre gets especially interesting when we find even smaller categories like action movies, or superhero action movies, or parody superhero action movies. So think of the superhero genre this way. There's usually an evil villain trying to do something terrible that the superhero is going to try and stop. There's usually smaller fight scenes throughout the movie and a big fight scene at the end, where the superhero or group of superheroes triumph, often by using their superpowers. The reason I don't have to mention spoiler alert is because I didn't give away any of the plot. And you all know that superhero movies follow this pattern. That narrative pattern and all the other ways that we can describe other repeating features is what makes up a genre. So what's more is that more than one genre can exist at once. Think of Ant-Man. It's a superhero movie. It's an action movie. It's a comedy and a parody of other superhero movies. Parodies are where we really see how genres work. After all, the reason Ant-Man is funny is because it's making fun of our expectations of what a superhero movie should be. It's making fun of the genre of superhero movies. We use these same terms and descriptions to analyze literary works, works of nonfiction and poetry too. So if I want to understand gothic novels like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley or Dracula by Bram Stoker, I'm looking for literary features that they share. Some of those features could be similar kinds of characters, plots, settings or themes. Is there a creepy stranger in a cape? Is there danger lurking in the shadows? Is there a haunted castle? Are you encouraged to think of the sinister side of humanity? If so, you might be reading a gothic novel. So when I analyze genre, I'm likely to compare and contrast those features and try to understand how one novel adheres to the conventions of a particular genre or breaks away from our expectations and does something different. We can describe a genre by showing how similar features are repeated and how those features include most any of the many literary terms that are featured in other videos in this series. For a gothic novel, we might see metaphors that connect events to scary or dangerous things. We might see foreshadowing of horrible events yet to come. Or we might see a flashback to something terrifying that happened in the past and that changes how characters act in the present. All of these are features of a particular genre. Now, one thing not to confuse with the idea of a genre is that of a medium. A medium is the form in which something is delivered. So we might say that the medium of a gothic novel is a printed book or that the medium of a superhero movie is that of film. Medium describes the kind of technology that is used to convey a story to us but doesn't necessarily help us understand the genre of what we're reading or watching. People often ask me, is email a genre of writing? And I respond by asking when writing an email if we're required to write in a particular way. And for the most part, we're not. In email, you can write a love letter. You can write an angry message to the company that sold you a dodgy product. Or you can write a poem. Email itself might suggest certain kinds of writing. For example, you probably shouldn't break up with someone through email. But it's a medium and that can hold lots of different genres. It itself is not a genre. Describing an analyzing genre is a powerful way to understand how narratives work and a really useful way to make sense of the stories and texts that surround it.