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chapter two
Genre as a moveable
feast
In this chapter we experiment with genre through fundamental prose and
poetry techniques. Genre is the French term for a type, species or class of
composition. The term genre is used to distinguish a broad range of dif-
ferent kinds of writing from the non-literary to the literary. In literary
studies it is primarily used to distinguish poetry, fiction and drama.
Genres are characterised by different codes and conventions: these change
with historical circumstances. The term genre, however, can also apply to
recognisable types of writing within a particular genre (such as the detec-
tive or science fiction novel), or different modes of writing within a genre
such as realism, satire or surrealism.
The first part of this chapter focuses on prose, the second on poetry. In
the first part we build up a short realist prose passage, and then revamp it
in surrealist and satirical modes. We see how genre is a moveable feast:
subtle changes in the way we use language effect changes in genre. In the
second half of the chapter we again move, this time from prose to poetry.
We convert a single sentence into a poem, and look at the many different
ways in which that sentence can be rearranged and transformed to
emphasise its poetic qualities. We are concerned throughout with issues
of representation : how we convey the world in words, in which genre is an
important factor. Although this chapter works separately with poetry and
prose, some strategies are relevant to both. This is particularly true of
metaphor, which is addressed in the poetry section but is also important
in prose.