CORE POST #2 Colton Elzey

 (Full disclosure: I am using this blog post as an attempt to try and organize my thoughts on the numerous notes from Jason Mittell's chapter on "Television Genres as Cultural Categories." Some of it may make sense, and some of it will most likely be jumbled rambling. Read on at your own discretion.)

Jason Mittell's book Genre and Television is an insightful, in-depth discussion of genre conventions specified to the medium of television, written and released in 2004, at the height of cable TV about 10 years before the streaming giants took over. His first chapter discusses the complications, nuances, and difficulty in genre analysis, touching on several modes of the academic form, as well as their limitations generally alongside the need for alteration with the unique medium of television--noting that most genre study at the academic level is regarded towards literature and film, not cable TV. His work proposes that the most correct method for studying genre is not textual, nor historical, but discursive.

Mittell's reasoning is that other modes of genre analysis, thought insightful and worthy of attention, often miss the entirety of the category for various reasons. He explains that genre is more than just the "text" writing "there is a crucial difference between conceiving genre as a textual category and treating it like a textual component, a distinction that most genre studies elide." Only some elements of the texts would categorize them in their specified genre, and while "physical elements do not change...their categorization does, suggesting that the category itself emerges from the relationship between the elements it groups together and the cultural context in which it operates.” The category does not define what you are; your group defines what the category is, and the cultural context defines what traits group those people together. We have "race" distinctions based on skin color, a physical trait, but nothing on eye color (unless you are on Roshar), because the culture has deemed that significant. "Texts have many different components, but only some are activated into defining generic properties." Therefore, the culture and textual elements define genre categories.

He also delves into the issues of interpretive/historical (?) analysis in genre study. Mittell explains that just as you cannot analyze the internal components of a car from the 1920s to decipher what brand it is today, you cannot apply historical analysis to a piece of art for a genre analysis. As the culture, and community change, the genre style changes. He writes: "Yet many scholars treat genres as timeless essences defined by an inner core rather than constituted by changing cultural practices." Thus, historical readings must be careful to make broad assumptions that would only apply to specific historical contexts.

In the end, Jason Mittell explains: “Interpretive analyses tend to treat genres as ahistorical and static, ignoring the ways genres shift and evolve in relation to their cultural contexts." They are often oversimplified. Therefore, genre is a conceptual category formed by cultural practices, and not inherent to elements of the text itself that the genre has categorized. The most proper form of genre analysis should be discursive, analyzing the elements that surround the media text in exhibition, production, cultural history and memory, context. 

Genre is more than the story; the text is not a genre. Genre is the interpretation of a culture's method for telling that style of a story. 

Phew.