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Journal 2: Genre & Audience

 

Genre is a means through which the speaker is attempting to communicate an idea or concept to their audience, who the speaker intends to be on the receiving end of their work.  Genre is a very personal matter to the speaker because it is how they choose to reach out to their reader.  In the same way, genre via reader response can also be personal since it is how the reader reacts.

When I think of audience, I think of a stage with actors and people sitting in a large room.  This might be because of my theatre background.  But a writing audience is similar to a performance audience.  The writer is presenting something to a group of people in the same way that a playwright or director is trying to present a story through stage performance, the genre.

 

Dirk views genre as something that helps “achieve a goal”.  Seeing genre in this way helped to clarify what it meant to me.  Sometimes terms get so technical, its true definition is lost among all the words.  Genre simply is there to help get the message across in a way the reader can understand it.  Dirk also references Miller by emphasizing the important role genre plays in  "shaping everyday life".  Because we are surrounded by so many messages and mediums both in word and non-text formats, we are constantly experiencing genre exposure.

 

To Anzaldua, genre is her language, her means of communication.  Depending on who she was around and where she was, she would switch between languages to match what society and expected of her.  Her cultural background gave her a “home language”, something she could identify with and something that held meaning to her while english was served as a language she spoke when she needed to.  She also was attempting to reach a goal to fit in.