What about Jay-Z doing a track with Linkin Park? What about Twilight being a vampire story/love story? What about Katy Perry featuring Kendrik on a song?

I don’t really “get” genre because it’s best when you mix it up. It’s best when I focus on the force and passion of the message rather than the category that’s containing it.

Breaking Dawn poster

Here is what the author of our most recent assigned reading (Devitt) says about why I ought to teach you about genre:

“…the more you are able to master particular genres, the better equipped you may be to master genres that you later encounter:
When people write, they draw on the genres they know, their own context of genres, to help construct their rhetorical action. If they encounter a situation new to them, it is the genres they have acquired in the past that they can use to shape their new action. Every genre they acquire, then, expands their genre repertoire and simultaneously shapes how they might view new situations. (Devitt, Writing 203)”

I don’t know, but I’m a “master” of mixing. How about you?

Oh, and one last thing: “Stan” by Eminem. That’s a whole heartbreaking story told in letters. And it’s rap…right??

Writers call that genre epistolary and it’s centuries old — but they couldn’t have known what would happen to it in 2002. No one searches under “epistolary songs” for “Stan.”