Genre Conventions Research Articles

Haunting the In-between: Gender and Genre in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost”

This article explores the interplay between gender and genre in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost”. Applying frameworks from short story theory and criticism, it deepens and expands Maureen O’Connor’s claim that Wilde employs “dissident” narrative conventions to expose and subvert patriarchal discourse and Anne Markey’s conceptualization of this text as a polyphonic narrative space. To do so, the article begins by examining key plot moments to illustrate the “poetics of liminality” (Achilles and Bergmann 2015: 4) of this ghost story, which parodies and subverts various genre conventions to “amuse and disturb” its readers (Markey 2010: 136) before transforming into a horrifying exposé of the role of literary conventions in the normalization of gender violence (O’Connor 2004). It further explores the story’s reception in cinematic adaptations and academic criticism, revealing how comedic and sentimental genre conventions have often been heightened to obscure its darker, gendered themes. Finally, it focuses on the “condensation of multiple identities” (Achilles: 2015b) in the character of Virginia Otis, which complicates any straightforward reading of “The Canterville Ghost” as radical or reactive in terms of its gender politics. These discussions showcase Wilde’s mastery of the short story genre’s interrogative economy to challenge established literary conventions.

‘Youth trauma TV’ in Israeli Euphoria : Overcoming social limitations and generic conventions

This article examines how the Israeli creators of the television series Euphoria explored traumatic realities of youth, while confronting genre conventions and cultural and social television production/distribution restrictions on creating teen drama series. Based on production research and text analysis, the article analyzes Euphoria ’s themes and storytelling and the way it created ‘youth trauma TV’ sub-genre. The series and its creators rebel against traditional television representation of youth trauma at the level of content and storytelling, as well as at the meta-level of Israeli conventions of the genre of youth series.

Fragments of Dystopia: Exploring The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

Background: The dystopian novel has evolved as a critical literary genre, reflecting societal anxieties about industrialization, authoritarianism, and global inequities. Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001), while not explicitly dystopian, contains fragments of dystopian thought, exploring themes of migration, identity, and systemic inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel’s portrayal of alienation, socio-economic divides, and existential uncertainty aligns with dystopian motifs, offering a critique of global power structures and neoliberal systems. This study positions The Pickup within a framework of fragmented dystopia, integrating postcolonial and critical dystopian theories to analyze its themes and narrative structure. Objective: This paper aims to examine The Pickup through the lenses of postcolonialism and critical dystopia, highlighting how Gordimer critiques global systems of power and privilege while exploring the resilience of the human spirit. By synthesizing existing scholarship and applying theoretical frameworks, the study seeks to uncover the novel’s implicit warnings about dehumanization, cultural dislocation, and systemic inequities in a globalized world. Method: The analysis employs postcolonial theory, particularly Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and the "third space," and Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, to explore themes of identity, migration, and cultural othering. Additionally, Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini’s framework of critical dystopia is used to examine the novel’s fragmented narrative structure and its portrayal of systemic inequality and resistance. Close textual analysis is conducted to elucidate the interplay between personal and political struggles in the novel. Findings: The study reveals that The Pickup operates as a fragmented dystopia, critiquing global inequities and the dehumanizing effects of border regimes and neoliberal systems. The novel’s protagonists, Julie Summers and Ibrahim ibn Musa, embody the tensions of cultural hybridity and systemic oppression, reflecting broader societal fractures. Gordimer’s portrayal of alienation, socio-economic disparities, and existential uncertainty aligns with dystopian motifs, while the novel’s ambiguous ending suggests possibilities for resistance and transformation. The desert setting serves as a metaphor for existential reckoning, emphasizing the characters’ search for meaning in a fragmented world. Conclusion: The Pickup transcends conventional genre boundaries, blending postcolonial and dystopian elements to interrogate identity, power, and resistance. By critiquing both colonial legacies and contemporary global inequities, Gordimer’s novel offers a nuanced exploration of the human condition in an unequal and fragmented world. The study underscores the novel’s relevance as a prescient commentary on the perils of systemic inequality and the potential for human agency in the face of adversity. Novelty: This study introduces a novel interpretive lens by framing The Pickup as a fragmented dystopia, integrating postcolonial and critical dystopian theories. It contributes to existing scholarship by highlighting the novel’s implicit dystopian elements and its critique of globalization, migration, and systemic inequality. The analysis opens new avenues for exploring Gordimer’s work in relation to contemporary global challenges, offering fresh insights into the intersections of identity, power, and resistance in a transnational context.

Responding to wetiko Crime: Understanding Harold Johnson's Backtrack through the Indigenous Literary Analysis Model (ILAM)

Cree author Harold Johnson's crime novel Backtrack draws on Cree oral traditions and Cree legal traditions to create a contemporary story about the wetiko, a human transformed into a cannibal monster who murders people, and the Cree laws and legal processes that are used to respond to wetiko crimes. The Indigenous Literary Analysis Model (ILAM) is a method developed for critically analysing Indigenous literatures. Through ILAM, analysis of Backtrack identifies that while this novel demonstrates some continuity with Canadian crime fiction genre conventions, it also challenges and rewrites those conventions. Ultimately, Backtrack can be understood as a cultural knowledge text that incorporates elements of Western literary conventions while remaining firmly within the Indigenous literary canon.

Exploring the Creative Art of Sergei Kuriokhin—Avant-Garde Musician, Cultural Theorist, and Cineast: Four Sergei(s) and Two Memoir Interviews

This text explores the life and legacy of Sergei Kuriokhin, a multifaceted artist who profoundly impacted Soviet and post-Soviet culture. Known for his radical experimentation in music, theater, and film, Kuriokhin defied conventional genres through his groundbreaking project, ‘Pop Mechanics’, which blended jazz, classical music, rock, circus acts, and more. His provocative performances often included surreal elements and bizarre satire, challenging cultural norms and the boundaries of Soviet censorship. Kuriokhin’s influence extended into politics, where his satirical “Lenin was a Mushroom” program questioned historical and ideological narratives, stirring public debate. His charisma, intellectual depth, and penchant for the absurd made him a central figure in Leningrad’s avant-garde scene. Kuriokhin collaborated with prominent artists and philosophers, leaving an indelible mark on Russian art and political discourse. This work, presented through the reflections of his close associates, offers insights into his lasting impact on Russian culture, blending history with personal mythologies.

The Syntax of Resistance: The Use of Language and Genre to Assert Indigenous Identity and Inclusion in Australian Literature

This paper will explore the use of language as a form of resistance among the indigenous writers of Australia. My plan is to examine how altering English syntax and modifying the conventions of narrative genre create layers of resistance to literary conventions to assert indigenous identity and belonging. Syntax is a path of disclosure that reaches deep into the matrix of indigenous literature and, just as paganism embraces a spirituality free of dogma, this body of literature pursues a voice, a syntax free of the language structures of the Invader. Paradoxically, indigenous writers seek a language independent of colonial influences, while knowing this may not be possible, except through the reanimation of the Dreamtime, that primordial state of the beginning.

Автореференційні модуси творчості Олександри Судовщикової-Косач: еґо-текст «Хаос» і драма «Чому»

The article examines the unique aspects of bilingual writer Oleksandra Sudovschykova’s (pen name: Hrytsko Hryhorenko) creative legacy. It focuses on her autobiographical work “Chaos” and the unpublished drama “Why”, housed in the National Museum of Ukrainian Literature. The purpose of the article is to analyze the autoreferential discourse as the primary theme in both works. In recent years, there has been increased interest in autoreferential discourse within philology. This concept involves the author’s self-referential messaging as the main subject, implying intense textual reflexivity anddeliberate self-identification attempts. Investigating autoreferentiality combinesvarious literary methods: historical-cultural, structural-semiotic, and psychological, along with intertextual and metadramatic analysis elements. The research also compares autoreferential modes in documentary and fictional works, exploring the interplay between nonfiction literature and fictional imagery. Results. The article examines gender aspects in Oleksandra Sudovschykova’s autoreferential discourse, focusing on emancipatory themes, female thinking, andself-conceptualization in two works. It considers modern scholarly interpretations of gender in late 19th and early 20th-century literature (V. Ageeva, L. Miroshnychenko, M. Krupka, A. Shvets). The study highlights innovations in women’s writing through Sudovschykova’s self-expression in the ego-text “Chaos” and the play “Why”. It concludes that autoreferentiality modes in these works are shaped by genre conventions while rooted in the author’s personal experience and identity. “Chaos” exemplifies nonfiction’s unique frankness, with a stream-of-consciousness style where the writer identifies as a new Hamlet-type woman. “Why” explores the heroine’s struggle between self-realization in a male-dominated world and domestic life. Both texts are valuable for being among the first in early 20th-century Ukraine to illustrate the formation of dissent within established gender paradigms.

Emerging digital factual storytelling in English language learning: Investigating multimodal affordances

Attention has been given to multimodal texts to investigate their potential meaning affordances that facilitate learning and raise awareness of ideological meanings. However, how learners learn to make meaning by integrating intermodal relations involving language and visual images, especially in the context of learning English as a foreign language (EFL), has not been researched much. This study investigated the emerging process of meaning-making in digital factual storytelling practices in a senior high school in Indonesia. Fifty-six students participated in this study and each produced a digital storytelling video (DST). The DST videos were analyzed using an intersemiotic complementary framework to reveal the occurrences and typical intermodal meaning-making practices, as shown in the student digital storytelling (DST) videos on autobiography. The analysis focused on describing the emerging modes of making experiential meanings of the intermodal verbal-visual relations. It was found that the process of meaning-making was dominantly constructed in an exposition manner involving the verbs within clauses for identifying and describing. The emerging meanings resulting from the multimodal affordances allow storytellers to track with the potential meanings projected by the images. The selection of digital images helps students explore words when telling a story, shifting the conventional genre of autobiography. This study indicates the need to emphasize the purpose of text and to afford multimodal features to support the achievement of communication purposes.

Rewatching Content on Streaming Platforms: The Pursuit of Ontological Comfort

Why do people tend to rewatch series and films when they have numerous new options at their disposal? This article develops the notion of rewatching on streaming platforms as an essential and enduring aspect of televisuality. Our analysis draws from diary reports completed during one month by 40 streaming platform users in Costa Rica, as well as focus group conversations with 13 of these participants. We examine rewatching as a pursuit of <em>ontological comfort</em>, that is, the sense of well-being derived from people’s understanding of everyday life and their conscious capacity to act in it. We argue that rewatching expresses an active search for stability, predictability, and orchestrated surprise through the narratives and conventions of certain televisual genres and the self-schedule affordances of streaming platforms. This study thus examines the nuanced significance of rewatching and its fundamental connection to the notion of comfort.

Style and Cynicism: Reading and Writing Hardboiled Detective Fiction in Secondary English

ABSTRACT This article explores the pedagogical potential of closely reading and writing hardboiled detective fiction in a Canadian secondary English Language Arts classroom. Grounded in narrative theory and co-taught with a local high-school teacher, the unit focused on the cynical narration and stylistic elements of authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Through close readings and creative writing exercises, students engaged with the genre’s thematic concerns of societal corruption and urban decay, honing their narrative skills by crafting their own detective stories. Emphasising the genre’s relevance amidst contemporary social and political challenges, the study highlights how teaching hardboiled fiction enabled students to critically explore narrative voice, genre conventions, and the expressive potential of literary cynicism. By fostering a nuanced understanding of narrative construction and perspective, the unit aimed to empower students to articulate their own perspectives on societal issues through literary expression.

Two Waves of the Neo-Ottoman Invasion: The Turkish Dizi and Pakistani TV Drama

This article explores the dynamics of transnational media formation by comparing the reception of Turkish television serials ( dizis) in Pakistan with how Turkey is signified in dramas produced in Pakistan and set in Turkey/Pakistan. It identifies two phases to suggest that when the dizi first arrives in Pakistan, the values and visibilities projected on Turkish serials remain ‘foreign’ and ‘other’ to many audiences, even if their flawless presentation of ‘modernity’ is alluring. Even as Turkish content was flooding Pakistan, the Turkish government offered incentives to Pakistani media companies to shoot on location in Turkey. I focus on two Pakistani dramas set in Turkey to discern how the encounter with Turkey was thematised as both lure and threat to Pakistani social norms and the formal conventions of the national genre of Urdu TV drama. I then move to the second and current phase and examine the statist reconfiguration of Turkish television in Pakistan. Historical dizis, such as Dirilis Ertuğrul and Kuruluş Osman, reframe the confrontation between foreign and domestic forms through a trans-territorial Islamic world-making that enables Turkish and Pakistani states to direct their televisual publics via a shared past to possible futures.

What Has Remained of the Beliefs about the Wiedźma/Ved′ma and the Czarownica/Koldun′ia? Charmers, Wicked Midwives, and Anthropophagites in Polish and East Slavic Magic Folktales from the Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries

In Polish and East Slavic magic folktales, the wiedźmy/ved′my (hags) and the czarownice/koldun′i (witches) are characters who, on the one hand, display features attributed to their prototypes (i.e. supernatural creatures of folk belief), but, on the other, are subject to the genre conventions of fictional stories. Their identification is further complicated by significant cultural influences concerning their portrayal in the imagination of the rural community. This article aims to identify the properties typical of the czarownice/koldun′i and the wiedźmy/ved′my as they are preserved in folktales of magic and present them within a historical and cultural context. Of particular interest are names given to these characters in tales, along with their appearance, extensive magical abilities, characteristic activities, social roles, functions performed, and the various types of death that befall them.

It’s ‘In the Blood’

The idea of a game having a ‘signature song’ is well established: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater’s (2004) main theme famously took cues from James Bond themes, Persona 5’s “Last Surprise” (2016) became the subject of multiple viral videos and memes, and in the Nintendo 64 days, Grant Kirkhope’s “DK Rap” was becoming lodged in the minds of people all over the world. For Hades, this song is “In the Blood.” To understand how this song is crafted and how it portrays the narrative, atmosphere, and setting of Hades, this paper will analyze the creative choices that Darren Korb made when composing “In the Blood.” This will take the form of both a harmonic analysis and an investigation into the various musical signifiers that appear in this piece, particularly how they connect “In the Blood” to various genres and subgenres of music, and the broader video game music canon. Korb’s description of Hades’s soundtrack as “Maybe Mediterranean prog-rock Halloween music” reveals an attempt at transcending genre conventions, which links to gaming’s tendency to draw from and compare itself to other mediums. Each word of his description points to a particular musical signifier that carries its own connotations and history of use both inside and outside of video games. These signifiers do not come together as much as they act as established signposts for “In the Blood” to exist between. Such a context helps explain how video game music can exist beyond genre, connecting with listeners who may not ordinarily listen to music of that particular genre, and how diverse fandoms form around these signature songs.

"Jak to ze lnem było"? Uwagi na temat bajki Marii Konopnickiej

The article is devoted to Maria Konopnicka’s short prose Jak to ze lnem było. The tale from the volume Książka dla Tadzia i Zosi (1892) constitutes an attempt to read the work in the context of the writer’s work written with young readers in mind, with a clear pedagogical aspect. In addition, it establishes interpretative proposals resulting from the genre convention of the tale. It focuses on the title thread, i.e. the motif of flax, its cultivation and value in the material culture, economy and folk tradition of the 19th century. It presents the different use of the motif of flax in the legacy of Konopnicka and H. Ch. Andersen. It shows the elements in the author’s autobiography that are connected with the presence of flax in Polish and Lithuanian folklore.

Polska i Syberia. Przypadek Igora Newerlego. O "Wzgórzu Błękitnego Snu"

The subject of the article is the issue of the 1986 novel entitled The Hill of the Blue Dream by Igor Newerli. Its main character is a terror-accused political exile associated organizationally with the PPS Proletariat, and ideologically with the Warsaw radical intelligentsia of the early century, including Krzywicki, Abramowski, Sempołowska. The main scion of the novel’s plot is set in Siberia. The author of the novel is interested in the ethnostereotypes presented in the novel, such as, for example, the Siberian, the Russian, the Buryat. He analyzes the genre conventions and plot solutions present in the novel. He also answers the question of how the dark sides of socialist-conspirator life, such as suspicions of treason, permeate into the Siberian Arcadia in which the protagonist lives. The author of the article looks at the book from two perspectives: the time in which it is set – the first decades of the 20th century, and the place and time of its publication. It is Poland of the second half of the 1980s plunged into marasmus and hopelessness ruled by authorities linked to the USSR.

Performing Plurality: Meet the Alters Vlogs on YouTube as Breeding Grounds for Epistemic Justice

Social media platforms have provided people with a psychiatric label the opportunity to build communities and share their stories without relying on the mediation of therapists, publishers, or broadcasters. Among them are people who identify not as one whole self, but as a system of plural personalities, often labeled as dissociative identity disorder (DID). People with plural identities started sharing videos on YouTube as a means to convey their experiences and fight stigma. In 2009, this gave rise to a distinct sub-genre of vlogs created by people with plural identities and DID: the ‘Meet the Alters’ video, where various personalities introduce themselves to the audience. This paper traces the fifteen-year evolution of these videos in order to show how the makers of the Meet the Alters videos use YouTube’s affordances and the conventions of the vlog genre to navigate a lack of hermeneutic resources outside of psychiatric discourse and understanding, allowing them to communicate their experiences in a relatable way to a general audience. Through a close reading of the staging and performance of plurality in thirteen Meet the Alters videos, posted between 2009 and April 2024, the paper reveals key developments and particularities of this genre. The analysis highlights how plural YouTubers create their own hermeneutic resources to present their potentially unfamiliar or unruly experiences in an understandable manner to their viewers. In conversation with emerging and growing plural communities, these hermeneutic resources have been continually supplemented and refined. After fifteen years, this has resulted in a rich identity-centered discourse that enables the performance and communication of plural experiences. We argue that YouTube’s specific affordances and the generic conventions of the vlog have been crucial in the emergence and development of non-stigmatising, non-psychiatric hermeneutic resources for expressing plural experiences.

Gry interdyskursywne w rosyjskojęzycznych parodiach politycznych

Political parodies transcend the prevailing social hierarchies, opening the field for polemics with government representatives. They also provide a space for the contamination of two or more distant discourses. In their texts, parodists refer to the rules of creating texts and utterances of political discourse, while modifying their selected elements by means of interdiscursive games. The purpose of the study is to define the category of the interdiscursive game and to analyze its strategies based on the example of contemporary Russian parodies on political issues published on YouTube. The study examines interdiscursive games grouped according to the following classification: genre convention games, intertextual games, games at the level of different linguistic means, structural games involving extralinguistic signs. As a result of the analysis, parodic interdiscursive games were divided into two categories: first-degree references and further references. The references of the first degree consist in transferring the main imitated discourse to the discourse of the comic. The second type of games concerns parodic references to other discourses that are introduced to the main imitated discourse. Interdiscursive games of both types help to discover the mechanisms that shape the political discourse. Thus, parody, using borrowed schemes, reveals those meanings which were not expressed explicitly in the original texts and utterances.

ENHANCING DISCIPLINARY AND GENRE LITERACY: A GENRE-ORIENTED APPROACH TO TEACHING ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES

This article explores the ways to teach disciplinary literacy through a genre-oriented approach, which emphasises the impact of genre and disciplinary conventions on the structure and language used in scholarly texts. Drawing from international research, the study examines the implementation of this approach in Russian academic settings. The findings suggest that implementing the techniques of the “teaching-learning cycle” enables students to effectively navigate the process of mastering disciplinary genre conventions, empowering them to create texts in target genres. Developing these skills enhances students’ publishing and conference presentation opportunities, facilitating their integration into professional communities. Additionally, the approach improves overall writing quality by enhancing language selection and fostering metacognitive skills.

Affects as affordances: disability and the genres of the actionable.

Prominent theorists such as Tobin Siebers, Ato Quayson, and Martha Stoddard Holmes have proposed that disability may not only elicit different affects, such as fear, admiration, or disgust, but have also envisioned different ways in which the relationship between affect and disability is becoming a central concern in considering how disability is ultimately lived through and experienced in social life. This paper supplements the conceptualization of the affect-disability relationship with the conceptual apparatuses of affordances and genre, to offer an account of the actionable. The actionable is proposed as a form of socio-cultural negotiation of the body and the environment out of which opportunities for action-or affordances- arise. Thomas Stoffregen has proposed affordances as being relational-emergent in nature, meaning that affordances refer to the possibilities for action within a particular constellation of elements, while simultaneously not being reducible to the properties of the individual elements. This paper proposes that affect, understood as the bodily capacities to act and be acted upon, may be understood as evoking affordances-opportunities to act or be acted upon. Additionally, the notions of impairment and disability suggest that capacities and the possibilities of action may vary across different bodies. I connect this to the work by Lauren Berlant on genre, who suggests that modes of responsivity to being affected are rooted in generic thinking. Genres act as structuring and historical forms that embed affect in appropriate modes of responsivity within genre conventions. Affordances are subsequently linked to what is deemed a fitting action within a genre. By invoking Berlant's work, this paper proposes that the actionable opportunities afforded by bodies are preemptively inscribed in genre conventions, and that the concept of the actionable enables an analysis of which actions are deemed appropriate within genres. Because impaired and disabled bodies have a variety of capacities, these bodies may therefore also hold the capacity to disrupt generic expectations and therefore further emphasize the normativity of the presupposed appropriateness of actions.

Selling Out in the High Country

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023, 423 pp Among the many pleasures of reading Eleanor Catton’s idiosyncratic fiction is her sheer inventiveness, the sense that she likes to set herself difficult or even improbable writing challenges. Her works hover on the boundaries of established genres—coming of age in her first novel The Rehearsal (2008), crime fiction in The Luminaries (2013)—while refusing to abide by genre conventions. The Rehearsal could be seen as an anti-creative work: set in a performing arts school, the novel presents a caustic take on training in creative arts as ego-eviscerating initiation. The Luminaries arbitrarily (for many readers) fuses the extrinsic numerical patterns of Western astrology with a character-based historical murder mystery cum neo-Victorian sensation novel. Catton’s most recent novel, Birnam Wood, offers another kind of formal conundrum.