Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. And this week, we're finding our genre.
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For most of us of a certain age, I think our notions of "genre" were defined by the shelves at Blockbuster Video. Action over here, comedy over there, and thrillers in the back corner where the VHS covers could be more easily hidden. Fast forward an uncomfortable number of years and here in the streaming-era, genres have become more expansive. Netflix breaks the "Action Adventure" genre into 14 separate sub-genres and Amazon has a special category just for Indian Cinema and Bollywood.
Cyberpunk is still one of my favorite genres; in Neuromancer, the protagonist lives in a capsule hotel like this one. Photo by Alec Favale on Unsplash
Books have gone the same route: in the 1980s, the Yuma County Library had most of its fiction crammed into one of two rooms: the kids' room and the adult room. By the time I was eleven or twelve, I had pretty much forgone the kids' room and was getting most of my reading material from the adult room. (Lots of Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein. Notably, these books were not categorized in any way beyond fiction, alphabetical by author's last name. Just as at the video store, what few genres there were, were broad swathes like Romance or Westerns. Compare that to today where Barnes & Nobles has taken the already niche-genre of Science-Fiction and Fantasy and created five different sub-genres.
This is nothing new. We've always had genres. To me, the change is that the sub-genre has changed from something only those in the know (i.e. the fans) could readily name, whereas now, everyone is a fan and all intellectual properties have fandoms and so the semi-private sub-genre is now an openly stated classification system for any and all to peruse. When I first read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, cyberpunk had only been around for a little under a decade brought into full subgenre status by William Gibson’s Neuromancer and no one had any idea what I was talking about. Now it’s a category on Amazon.
But again, genre itself is not a new idea. Just take a look at the Wikipedia entry for List of Genres. It’s massive. It spans everything from Bildungsroman to Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction with stops at Shenmo and Legal Thriller in between. What’s more, there’s a whole other list just for writing genres. The rest of the internet has done its part to preserve even the most niche of sub-genres with lists like this one and this one that do their best to remind us of the once-popular genres that are now in decline.
When I write my trans-humanist, Cthulhu whodunnit, this will be the book cover. It’ll be the only example of its genre, ever. Photo by Alexis Fauvet on Unsplash
And, because the internet loves nothing so much as it loves a good list, there are lists like this one from Flavorwire that tells us The Most Unusual Film Genres (which opens by telling us that Lars Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac belongs to a new film genre called Digressionism” that he just straight-up invented) and this slideshow from Dictionary.com about Offbeat Literary Genres To Get Lost In which recommends, among others, still occasionally used genres like picaresque (yeah!) and sentimental (boo!).
So genre, as a label, as a category-definer has been with us for a long time and likely always will be. But I’m curious to know what makes the jump - which genres get left behind only to be preserved in a list on the internet and which ones make the jump to category marker on Netflix and Amazon. Epistolary certainly hasn’t. Neither has mockbuster or bangsian. But cyberpunk did. Will slipstream or wuxia make it?
Who knows? Sometimes, the lifetime of a genre is incredibly short, like that of the found-footage horror film. There was the incredible, foundational Blair Witch Project, a bunch of knock-offs, the nadir of Cloverfield and then...nothing. Other times, the impetus that drove the genre changes or gets beheaded and then the need for the Libertine novel fades away. And then there are new genres whose body of work never grows large enough to ever be mainstream enough for a category label (looking at you Lars.)
I suppose it goes back to what I was saying above - sub-genres used to be a label known only to the diehard fans and maybe that’s still true. I’m not a diehard fan of Lars Von Trier and so I didn’t know that he had created a new genre. On the other hand, I am a fan of Chinese martial-arts fantasy movies, so I recognized the word wuxia when it popped up as an option on Netflix (code 8985!) And that’s…fine? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this sub-division of genre into niche and so on. If anything I think I’d like to see the trend continue. I’d like to see even more niche genres re-formed into category labels so we can see more works created that fit the genres we like. Because if all those lists on the internet have taught us just one thing, it’s this - every genre has its fans.
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Stay safe, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel