Contemporary Genre Research Articles

Disability as Socio-Rhetorical Action: Towards a Genre-Based Approach

In many respects, the reconceptualization of genre over the past few decades mirrors that of disability. Just as disability scholars and activists reject rigid categories of fixed difference based solely on individual deviations from some supposedly neutral norm, so too have contemporary genre theorists rejected the traditional view of genre as static categories of discourse that share certain objective conventional features. Such a view is unsatisfactory because, in casting genres as decontextualized, ahistorical forms or receptacles, it fails to adequately reflect the inherently social nature of discourse and texts. Instead, genre theorists now (re)conceive genres as dynamic sites of social action. Disability is also a form of social action, a rhetorical convention used to construct and regulate human actions and interactions, and, as such, can be viewed and analysed in generic terms. Conceiving disability as genre (and metagenre) provides an additional theoretical lens for examining and transcending, among other things, the reductive and oppressive categorization deployed by the medical model of disability. A perspective informed by genre theory helps to shift critical attention from description to explanation, a necessary step in deconstructing hegemonic discourses.

The centrality of the dead human body for teaching and research – social, cultural and ethical issues

Study of the cadaver is integral to both medical education and research, but how is cadaveric material to be obtained in the 21st-century world? Historical precedents are of little assistance, built as they are on the most unethical of practices, including body snatching and murder. This constitutes a major challenge for modern anatomy: has it been able to cast off all semblance of this unsavoury past? In this paper it is contended that the continued use of unclaimed bodies has proved problematic, ignoring as it does the fundamental ethical impetus of altruism. The use of bequeathed bodies is regarded as ethically preferable, even though cultural practices vary significantly, with the result that the availability of cadavers is uneven across societies. Recent legislation has brought the role of informed consent to the fore, and this is a welcome development. Nevertheless, immense challenges remain for anatomists, a major one being that posed by the large-scale public exhibitions of plastinated bodies, the prime exponent of which is Body Worlds. In assessing the manner in which the plastinates are displayed, those with Renaissance allusions have most in common with an educational rationale, although lacking a research ethos. The contemporary genre plastinates are the furthest removed from any traditional anatomical approach, and generally lack any teaching focus. They are also the most problematic ethically when assessed in terms of the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. Additionally, the character of donation is changed within the context of these public exhibitions.

No Way Out: Set Design in Mafia Films

This article considers Mafia filmmaking across Hollywood and Italian models. It presents an analysis of the set design of two recent Italian films, Le conseguenze dell'amore (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004) and Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008) that focuses on the inter-relationship between narrative and set design, and on the cinematic strategies used to present and give meaning to the sets. It shows that both films conform to the category of what the Affrons term a 'closely circumscribed set', where the spatial dimensions of the set are read in the first instance in literal terms, but beyond this as relevant to an implicit social and political agenda. It is however notable that the films actively exclude an explicit political dimension to their discourse, a factor that strongly modifies the earlier tradition of political filmmaking but retains significance for the production and reception of the contemporary genre form.

World Music : Whose music and whose world?

This article reflects on the contemporary phenomenon of ‘world music’, exploring how the commodified genre has developed and been marketed since the 1980s, and the implications that the genre has both for academic studies of music and culture and for the continuing sustainability of local music and cultural diversity. The article starts with a discussion of the bifurcation of world music between the commercial (a mix of relatively popular commodified forms that are often hybrid collaborations) and ethnographically rooted music (often archive or field recordings of ‘authentic’ traditions), and the challenges faced by the latter in a market dominated by the former. It utilizes critiques by Outhwaite, Said, Moretti, Adorno and others of Eurocentricism, orientalism and popular culture to position comments by, and products produced for, the world music community. Commentary is informed from a variety of sources - from musicians and producers, published texts, and from an Internet blog that began in response to my initial discussion of this topic in my 2008 inaugural professorial lecture at the University of London. Commentary builds a perspective on world music as particular mixes of the familiar and exotic/ Other that are typically experienced - using concepts elaborated by Guillermo Gomez?Pena and Anahid Kassabian - as ‘lite difference’ through ‘audio tourism’. A chronological perspective that begins with the promotion of gramophones in the early twentieth century is offered to show how world music has developed. And Korea provides a case study of the effort one country’s music industry is making to enter the commodified world music arena, noting how Korean funding agencies increasingly move from support of the iconoclastic traditional music (kugak) to contemporary genres such as the western?meets?eastern kugak fusion. The article ends by asking what the future might hold, and whether, as the recorded music industry declines, local music can continue to be championed.

Whose lives are they anyway?: the biopic as contemporary genre

Whose lives are they anyway?: the biopic as contemporary genre

Fiction and Colonial Identities: Arsène Lupin in Arabic

Along with Ponson du Terrail's Rocambole and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin is one of the most famous popular fiction figures in the 20th century Egyptian literary imaginary. The first Arabic translation of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur (1907) by essayist and translator ‘Abd al-Qādir Hamza was published in the Egyptian fiction serial The People's Entertainments (Musāmarāt al-sha‘b, 1904-1911) in 1910. This article explores the social and literary contexts in which Hamza's translation was produced, with emphasis on the birth of the individual as a legal and rhetorical construct in colonial Egypt. The article then turns to the figure of the ‘hero' in a medieval Arab literary tradition in flux at the end of the 19th century as a way of situating the translation within shifting contemporary genre practices. The article concludes with a reflection on worldly translation as a complex motor of renewal in local generic systems.

Waverley and the Object of (Literary) History

This essay revisits the question of Walter Scott's innovation as a novelist, and Waverley's status as the first historical novel, by showing the degree to which such markers of reputation were fictions of Scott's own making. The essay begins by examining how Scott's manipulation of the novel's date of composition, his ostentatious rejection of contemporary genres, and his later self-review of the novel effectively cleared Waverley of contemporary competitors and bolstered its claims to newness. It then turns to Scott's other strategy, that of looking beyond contemporary generic models to those of the mid-eighteenth century. In thus arguing for Waverley as a rumination on the history of the novel “sixty years since”—as a literary-historical as well as historical novel—the essay considers Scott's debt to the most popular of these midcentury fictions, the object narrative, by reading Waverley in light of its conventions and practices.

Photography, cinema and medium as social practice

One of the more interesting aspects of the dialogue between the mediums of the still and moving image that has taken place over recent years has been a concern within fine-art photography for the cinematic. Photographers have turned to the style and iconography of the established genres of cinema as a means of reinventing the pictorial form of the tableau and thereby to explore the possibilities of narrativity within the static image. However, beyond any aesthetic interest the contemporary genre of the ‘cinematic photograph’ may hold, it is argued here that it may be indicative of an important shift in the social, economic and technological bases of fine-art photography. This essay suggests that the significance of the ‘cinematic photograph’ lies in its complex forms of technical production, the mobilisation of skilled labour and professional expertise, and the deployment of substantial economic resources, which are to be found in the film industry. Through an analysis of the work of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson, the authors demonstrate how the formal and iconographic properties of his images are inseparable from his adoption of the cinema's specific modes of production and that the latter is central to a reading of Crewdson's photographs. The consequences this holds for our understanding of the medium of photography are developed with reference to Raymond Williams's concept of ‘medium as social practice’. The authors conclude that the ‘cinematic photograph’ might be regarded as symptomatic of a trend within contemporary art practices to model themselves on cinema as the emblematic form of cultural production of ‘late capitalism’, a trend that has significant implications for the dominant conceptions concerning the nature of the work of art and the role of the artist.

What roles for ruins? Meaning and narrative of industrial ruins in contemporary parks

This article is concerned with the notion that parks containing industrial ruins possess an emotional attraction that can depoliticize historical narratives. How can we design parks containing industrial ruins that reveal the multiplicities of history? In order to pursue this question, the article examines the literature to outline the relationships between the historical meanings of traditional ruins in landscape design and the contemporary emotional appeal of industrial ruins. The article also examines the relationship between cultural perceptions of industry, its ruins, and parks containing industrial ruins. The findings show that each of these three conditions (industry, industrial ruin, and park containing industrial ruins) are perceived differently, but all share the roles of icons, emotional objects, settings, workplaces, environmental agents and characters in cultural life. The article concludes with a guide for designers to assist in the creation of more complex narratives than are found in the contemporary genre of parks containing industrial ruins.

Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre

Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre

Excusing the female dancer: Tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing

Item songs are big-budget dance sequences in Bollywood and arresting examples of how bodies of dancing women in Bollywood, with fusion of traditional and contemporary dance genres construct new sites of sexual desire and identity in India. While these spaces of articulation are not immune to the circulation of female bodies in a globalized Indian economy these dancers do have the opportunity to convey a different kind of femininity than what has been allowed in Indian popular culture. Milder censorship, the MTV-revolution, the political-economy of making dance videos, the granting of industry-status to Bollywood and the exponential growth of the cosmetics industry are all fundamental to the changes. This article is a mapping of Bollywood dancers with an eye to Indian myths about dancing women, apsaras and devadasis, and an analysis of trends that allow rupture and re-articulation of dances and the ideologies they produce. The article employs a combination of dance and film studies analysis.

Gender, Genre, and the Near Future in Derrida's "The Law of Genre"

Gender, Genre, and the Near Future in Derrida's "The Law of Genre" Jonathan Crimmins (bio) Concluding their call for papers with Martin Heidegger's question, "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?"1 the organizers of the 1979 International Colloquium on Genre in Strasbourg wrote that this question "might be transformed to read: Why is there genre, rather than generalized Literature?" [Chartin et al. 237]. Derrida's response, the lecture called "The Law of Genre," suggested that the answer to both questions required attention to the other meaning of the term genre in French, gender. He inflected the question, "why are there literary types?" with the question "why are there genders?" In his work of the 1970s,2 Derrida had already brought gender to the fore, deploying metaphors of female sexuality as alternatives to Hegel's reliance on the trope of opposition—"law of day(light) against law of night, human law against divine law, law of man against law of woman" [Glas 146a]—and announcing in Spurs that his work had entered a "new phase" that would be "affirmative" [37]. If the mechanism of truth for Hegel was dialectical opposition, the negation of a negation, a no, no, Derrida would seek a philosophy that said yes, yes, a philosophy that he aligned with the feminine. The four movements of the lecture—Derrida's passage from the question of genre in general to a specific text in genre theory, then from a specific instance of genre to the narrator within that text—recall Plato's divided line [Republic VI 509d-510e]. Yet, where Plato describes the relation between the intelligible and the visible as a sexless mimetic relationship of the real to its image, Derrida inscribes gender difference into each section of his divided line. The two halves of his lecture restage the marriage trope he employed in "The Double Session," which enacted a "hymen" between theory and literature [183]: roughly speaking, the first half is theoretical, universal, public, male; and the second half literary, particular, private, female. Also, within each half, Derrida foregrounds the operation of gender difference: in the first half, the focus is on marriage, the public act that unites the genders; and in second half, the focus is on sex, the private act that does the same. The first half of "The Law of Genre" presents two ways of conceptualizing genre and articulates how the two appear conjoined within the many suppositions of genre theory. While Derrida leaves the two tendencies of genre theory unnamed, they are the classical view of genre, associated with structuralism and narratology, which I will call the formal bias, and the contemporary view of genre, associated with speech-act theory and rhetorical genre theory, which I will call the genre bias.3 Genre theorists smuggle one or the other [End Page 45] form of this fundamental bias into their work whenever they represent genre. Theorists who appeal to scientific, mathematical, or logical schematics to naturalize their argument, operate with the formal bias. Theorists who appeal to cultural, functional, or historical mechanisms, operate with the genre bias. Although contemporary genre theorists have tended to shift away from understanding genre as a taxonomical system towards understanding genre as the cultural conditions that enable textual production, vestiges of both biases persist. In the PMLA special issue, Remapping Genre (October 2007), for example, when Ed Folsom suggests the database as a metaphor for genre, he can be aligned with Gérard Genette, who argued for a tabular method of genre in which, "the overlap between n thematic classes and p modal or submodal classes would determine a considerable number—that is np, neither more nor fewer—of existing or possible genres" [Architext 77]. When Diana Taylor uses a "performance lens" [1417] she can be aligned with Carolyn Miller, who suggests that genres function according to "conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of 'acting together'" [36]. Throughout the first half of "The Law of Genre," Derrida painstakingly maintains a bivalent stance, articulating the mutual dependence of these two tendencies. He recognizes that these two biases require each other, and works against privileging either the one or the other, constantly foregrounding...

Just Us Girls: The Contemporary African American Young Adult Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Just Us Girls: The Contemporary African American Young Adult Novel Michelle H. Martin (bio) Just Us Girls: The Contemporary African American Young Adult Novel. By Wendy Rountree. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Wendy Rountree's Just Us Girls helps to fill a significant gap in young adult literary criticism. In this onehundred page, accessible analytical work, Rountree offers an engaging examination of the novels of a number of African American women who write young adult fiction. In the introduction she asserts that African American women writers tend to write about many of the same issues whether they're writing for adults or for young adults. She justifies this overlap by arguing that Perhaps, because the root causes of these primary issues such as [End Page 75] racism and sexism are so deeply entrenched in social, political, and economic institutions and society in general, these issues are never "solved" in literature or real life but are psychologically "managed" by African Americans . . . The function of African American children's and young adult literature is to teach young African Americans how to deal with these issues, not necessarily solve them, so that racism and sexism do not hinder their lives irrevocably. (2) Ultimately, Rountree claims that the role of African American young adult literature has not changed markedly since its inception; what's more, she suggests that black female identity is much more conflicted and complex than that of white teens, an idea that strongly influences this genre designed with black teens in mind. She quotes from Virginia Henderson's 1991 book Multicolored Mirror: Cultural Substance in Literature for Children and Young Adults, in which Henderson writes that "an African-American child born today will greet a world where racism, sexism, classism, handicapism, and a variety of other '-isms' continue to be subtly and blatantly at work" (3). In fact, if we consider the first magazine specifically designed for African American youth, or "Children of the Sun," as the editors labeled them—the Brownies' Book Magazine—we find a number of principles that also underpin black young adult fiction, perhaps the most relevant of these being "to make colored children realize that being colored is a normal, beautiful thing" (103). Though much has changed since 1920–21 when the Brownies' Book Magazine was published, Rountree's argument emphasizes that African American girls still need to be affirmed. Though Rountree argues that the contemporary genre serves a similar function now as it did more than eighty years ago, she also effectively argues that African American young adult literature has transformed other literary forms—namely, the Bildungsroman, a genre that traditionally featured a white male character. In the seven chapters of this volume, Rountree demonstrates just how that transformation has materialized in specific works by Mildred Pitts Walter, Rita Williams-Garcia, Rosa Guy, Virginia Hamilton, Candy Dawson Boyd, and Deborah Gregory, and in three different chapters Rountree focuses on works by Jacqueline Woodson. Chapter 1 takes as its critical lens Robert Stepto's idea of the "ritual grounds" to analyze the relationship of African Americans to their community. "Ritual grounds," sites that stand apart from the dominant society, tend to be safe spaces for black young people, but they can also be undermined by the dominant society of which they are a (generally marginalized) part (10). Using these ideas, Rountree examines the ways that Martha, the protagonist of Mildred Pitts Walter's Trouble's Child, finds strength but also oppression in her rural, African American island culture off the coast of Louisiana. Even though Martha identifies with her culture, she envisions a different life for herself than that ascribed by the traditions of her community. In this chapter Rountree offers an extensive comparison between Martha's situation and that of [End Page 76] Janie, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which provides some excellent historical and literary contextualization for the contemporary work and further strengthens Rountree's argument that African American women writers tend to cover some of the same thematic ground whether they're writing for adults or for young adults. In fact, Rountree's use of "adult" African American literature as comparative touchstones several times...

Adele Schopenhauer, Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48) (review)

Reviewed by: Adele Schopenhauer, Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48) Susanne Kelley Waltraud Maierhofer, ed., Adele Schopenhauer, Florenz: Ein Reiseführer mit Anekdoten und Erzählungen (1847/48). Weimar: VDG, 2007. 261 pp. Although Waltraud Maierhofer chose to transcribe an unfinished and incomplete manuscript in Adele Schopenhauer’s travel guide to Florence, Italy, her work enriches studies of the nineteenth century and travel literature alike. Along with the text about Florence, the publication contains two other short manuscripts, Italienisches Landleben in which she describes the impressions Italian rural culture makes on her, and the three-page Albano, den 1. Juni [1846] describing the burial of Pope Gregory XVI. While these short texts are autobiographical and offer insight into Schopenhauer’s personal experiences, Florenz takes on a more academic tone, even though the author’s intention is not scholarly but rather poetic: “Denn wie einer dieser mosaikartig zusammengefügten Blumensträuße, welche man diesem reichen Boden abgewinnt und die man in ganz Italien, besonders aber in Florenz dem dahin reitenden Reisenden in den Wagen wirft, so möchte ich in gewissem Sinn dem Leser mein Werk bieten: Blüte and Blüte, Krone [End Page 252] and Krone gereiht, in bunter, doch nicht unüberlegter Farbenmischung” (40–41). Although the author shines through her expertness in art history, she does not revel in her knowledge and instead makes sure to point out her own limitations (140–41). Describing her publication as a “Büchlein,” she implies that she does nothing more than offer her layman opinion about antique art and architecture. Hence, she addresses her readers not as their educator but as their equal who shares what facts she has learned along with anecdotes and stories she has come across, which distinguishes her travel guide from other travel publications, especially ones about Italy, around her time. The focus of this review, however, is not Schopenhauer’s travel guide itself, but Maierhofer’s scholarly investment in making the text available to a potentially diverse readership. The transcription is well researched and annotated in great detail, offering valuable factual and explanatory information that makes the book accessible and interesting to both experts and novices in nineteenth-century studies. Most of all, it puts to the forefront an artistically and culturally important woman whose work is often overlooked and certainly overshadowed by her brother Arthur. In addition to four hundred eighty-seven footnotes, Maierhofer also provides a thirty-page introduction which she begins by contextualizing Schopenhauer’s book within the genre of the practical travel guide, only to point out the obvious conclusion that it isn’t comparable to the works produced by such publishers as Baedeker and Murray (30): “Als These sei formuliert, daß Schopenhauer mit ihrer Stadtbeschreibung eine weniger ernste, unterhaltsame, vergnügliche Art des Reisens reflektiert und die ‘weibliche’ Tradition des Geschichtenerzählens verbindet mit dem neuen Genre des Reiseführers als einer auf Faktisches beschränkten, am bürgerlichen Bildungspensum orientierten Texgattung” (14). Schopenhauer’s text represents a new style within the literary tradition of travel writing, a style that is clearly ahead of her time, as it blends facts with fiction, and objective information with personal perspective. One might call her style modern, as the blend of style, genre, and perspective is a trademark of contemporary travel writings. Maierhofer points out the contemporary popularity of the “litera-rische Reiseführer” (29), but it would have enriched Maierhofer’s introduction to add an analysis relating Schopenhauer’s text to the contemporary genre of travel literature. Instead, Maierhofer insists on measuring up Florenz to Baedeker and Murray (19), even after having clearly established that the text follows not only completely different criteria but also a different goal, as well as a different readership. Maierhofer’s perhaps weakest introductory section is “Gender und Reiseführer,” due not only to said superfluous comparison to the practical city travel guide, but also to a lack of true engagement with the announced topic, that is, gendered authorial perspective and gendered audience. This is surprising, since she posits in her thesis that Schopenhauer’s text could and should be read with a gendered perspective. Maierhofer claims that Schopenhauer did not...

Fear on the Footsteps of Comedy: Childhood and Paranoia in Contemporary American Cinema

Beginning in the 21st century the American conspiracy thriller, one of the most popular of contemporary genres, became preoccupied with scenarios of protagonists threatened with the loss of children. What had until recently been the subject of light-hearted family films, i.e., on the growing up of children and the growing down of adults, reappeared here as a reason for dread. Tracing the very gendered nature of this fear in the contemporary thriller, this paper contextualizes the phenomenon in the culture of a radicalized globalized capitalism and an outcome of the neo-liberal turn since the 1980s.

The Learning History: Analyzing an Emerging Genre

Contemporary genre theory contends that genres are flexible, dynamic, and deeply embedded within the institutional cultures that created them. In this examination of the learning history, an emerging genre of organizational research writing, genre theory is used to examine the ways in which the learning history serves the rhetorical aims of the writer. Understanding the social image, rhetorical dynamics, and formal features of this genre will help organizational writers and researchers use learning histories within a qualitative research methodology. Furthermore, this research serves to demonstrate that genre analysis itself can be a rigorous research methodology.

“Soul Is But Harmony”: David Josef Bach and the Workers' Symphony Concert Association, 1905–1918

Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.

Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Oriented Rock

Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Oriented Rock Charles Kronengold Disco had a purpose: making you move on the dance floor. But it also sold millions of records, revived careers, provoked debates about the effects of music, got cross-marketed with congas, made songs go through people’s heads, pushed the record industry to introduce the twelve-inch single, gave rock artists the chance to write pop songs, threatened friendships, turned session musicians into auteurs, served as a platform for foreign singers trying to enter the North American market, and changed the way songs were constructed. So beyond fulfilling its primary function as dance music, what else did disco have to give? The answer lies partly in its multiple modes of address—its commitment to the dance floor, participation in the soul tradition, and success on the pop charts. Pursuit of these distinct ambitions meant that disco’s materials and conventions circulated widely, making them available to other genres. Indeed its conventions appeared in many contemporary genres that didn’t have dancing on the agenda. But, I’ll argue, disco’s legacy has also to do with the way it made its materials available, allowed them to circulate, and put them into a system of exchange. The exchanges I’m discussing happened around the time of the record industry’s commercial peak, and sudden crash, at the end of 1979. The musical-historical context is important as well: talking about disco demands an acknowledgment of its precursors in African American music of the seventies, like funk, soul, Philadelphia soul, and the black-action-film soundtrack. When you study these genres you can’t entirely abandon the notion of a genre as a set of rules and constitutive features; but these and other genres of the seventies can often be better defined with reference to their internal variety and proliferation of subgenres, their modes of revision and transformation, and their movement toward other genres. They constantly remind us that genres are in works as much as works are in genres. This essay considers three late-seventies genres—disco, new wave, and album-oriented rock—that overlap in varying degrees with [End Page 43] respect to their historical moment, modes of dissemination, institutional frames (like record labels), musical materials, personnel, and audiences. Songs in each of these genres contain musical hooks and sometimes succeed on the pop charts. They also borrow from the same genres and from one another. I will be particularly concerned with this kind of cross-borrowing in what follows. Marcel Mauss makes the crucial point that when different cultures engage in trade, they trade not only goods, but methods and concepts of exchange.1 To give a quick example of the sort I’ll discuss further: when a new-wave song borrows disco’s conventions like four-on-the-floor and processed percussion sounds, it often acquires at the same time disco’s tendency toward stratified textures that allow other types of material to ease into the mix. A new-wave song may thus incorporate material from some third genre—material, that is, that derives neither from disco nor new wave. Every party to an exchange operates within a set of understandings about what can and can’t, will or won’t be traded, and why. This greatly interested Mauss. Thinking about exchange as a metaphor for genre mixing, however, I’ll want to emphasize that each such exchange shows something about these concepts of exchange; I’m seeking to bring out the latent theory revealed in acts and channels of exchange. My analysis will pay close attention to specific musical conventions, so let me quickly say why: (1) Conventions are sedimented with history. (2) They also possess a materiality on records that can’t be written off: four-on-the-floor is simply there regardless of authorial intent or audience response. (3) Expressive conventions remind us that when a musician communicates something, she does so in a language only partly her own. (4) I want to make a space for talking about metaconventions—conventions governing the use of other conventions—like irony in new wave, and the idea of rock as an art form...

Archival News

Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative and the Contemporary Action Film Scott Higgins Abstract The concept of situational dramaturgy, a form of narrative construction inherited from nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, reveals continuities between classical narrative and the "post-classical" action film. This essay argues that situations bridge spectacle and narrative, provide generative structures for action plots, and are enmeshed in the contemporary three-act structure. The action film has the double distinction of being both one of the most popular and most popularly derided of contemporary genres. In mainstream discourse, the genre is regularly lambasted for favoring spectacle over finely tuned narrative. As the critic Annabelle Vilaneuva put it, "action movies don't even feel like movies anymore, they're little more than two-hour trailers for action movies."1 Nonetheless, every summer testifies to the genre's pride of place in major studio economics. Action films serve Hollywood well, displaying the production values that enable American movies to dominate world markets. Ten of the twenty-five all-time, worldwide, top-grossing films are in the action genre; event films often wear action clothing.2 Critics and studio marketers have actually cooperated in defining the genre's popular reputation as a vehicle for sensation. The master metaphor for the action film is the "roller coaster ride," or more simply "the ride," which promises to sweep the viewer through a series of thrills. This might seem derogatory, but it can just as easily be co-opted as a means of selling the films. Newspaper ads for Mission Impossible II, for example, used Joel Siegel's Good Morning America quip "put your mind on Cruise control and fasten your seatbelts." The blurb is hardly a ringing endorsement of character complexity or nuanced drama, but it is an endorsement nonetheless. This reputation has led a number of scholars to claim that the creation of marketable thrills has replaced narrative coherence as the primary concern of popular American cinema.3 In this essay, I seek a more precise understanding of the action genre as a particular kind of storytelling. Action films do appear to offer something distinct from classical narrative as it is commonly defined, but they are not wholly divorced from Hollywood tradition, nor are they necessarily anticlassical or nonnarrative. [End Page 74] The roller coaster metaphor has descriptive value, but not necessarily at the expense of coherent and engaging narrative. Rather, I argue that the action genre inherits a melodramatic narrative tradition that predated, and was absorbed by, classical Hollywood cinema. The commonly held view of narrative and spectacle as oppositional, and the emphasis on the genre's apparent subversion of classical qualities, have clouded our historical understanding of the action film. In contrast, the concept of situational dramaturgy helps bridge spectacle and narrative, and places the contemporary action film in a tradition that stretches through the classical period from historical adventures, to sound serials, to the James Bond franchise. In fact, in the action film, we often find an elegant integration of classical and melodramatic narrative practice, and this helps account for the particular pleasure of the genre, for its power to produce a "ride." Melodrama may well inform other contemporary Hollywood genres, but in the action film, it flourishes. The genre gives us privileged insight into the interaction between melodramatic and classical dramaturgy, and should help us rethink what we mean by "nonclassical." Rethinking the Spectacle/Narrative Divide Any account of the action film must confront the venerable question of spectacle and narrative. Most scholars approaching the genre are occupied with the tension between the two terms, seeing them in opposition, with spectacle dominating. Spectacular moments figure strongly as product differentiation within the genre.4 In his essay "Action Films: The Serious, the Ironic and the Postmodern," James Welsh describes action films as "products designed by committees of writers and armies of technicians with one goal in mind: building bigger spectacle in order to generate millions of box-office dollars."5 Classical Hollywood, the common argument goes, subordinated spectacle to...

Public and Popular: British and Swedish Audience Trends in Factual and Reality Television

The research in this article examines audience responses to a range of factual and reality genres. It takes as a starting point that television audiences do not experience news or documentary or reality TV in isolation but as part of a range of factual and reality programmes. Factual and reality programming includes a broad understanding of non-fictional programming on broadcast television, satellite, cable and digital television. The breakdown of factual and reality programming into specific genres includes news, current affairs, documentary, and reality programmes, with further sub genres applied within each of these categories. This article critically examines genre evaluation. The quantitative research in this article is based on two national representative surveys conducted in Britain and Sweden. In both Britain and Sweden, programme makers have moved towards a reliance on popular factual genres. In Britain this is across all channels, and in Sweden this is mainly concentrated on commercial channels. Whilst there is still a commitment to news, there is an increasing use of hybrid genres in an attempt to popularise factual output. The impact of this changing generic environment on audiences is that in both countries viewers have reacted by drawing a line between traditional and contemporary factual genres. It is precisely because of the redrawing of the factual map that viewers rely on traditional ways of evaluating genres as public and informative, or popular and entertaining. The data provides evidence that contributes to existing debate on television genre, public service broadcasting, and media literacy skills. The central argument in this article is that genre evaluation is connected with wider socio-cultural discourses on public service broadcasting and popular culture, and that these are common social and cultural values that are shared by national audiences in two Northern European countries.