Genre’s Normative Function

Brief and wandering thoughts on genre.

Link Roundup: November 4, 2024

Fritz Lang on his film M and a tutorial for HTML-based resumes.

What is Genre?

A concept that is has been popping up in recent posts is genre. It’s not surprising, as genre is central not only to film–increasingly, the focus of this blog–but to rhetoric and writing studies, my academic home. But what is genre?

Masculinity in Shane and Yojimbo

I’ve been going through some of my notes from a film genre class I took in graduate school. One week, we watched Shane and Yojimbo as cross-cultural examples of the western, which historically commingled with the samurai film in Japan.

Men (2022)

A few weeks ago, I went to see Alex Garland’s film Men. I really enjoyed, especially in the context of my growing interest in both film genre studies and the specific genre of horror.

Satoyama, Modernity, and Tradition in Japanese Anime

I’ve been reading scholarship about anime, its history, and how it deviates from animation in the United States. It’s frequently observed that tensions between tradition and modernity are often central to anime.