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date: 20 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This article studies film genre theory and provides a brief assessment of genre theory in the twenty-first century. It also attempts to plan a reasonable course for the future of genre studies across the various disciplines of media studies. It aims to show how the descriptive imperatives of genre criticism can be settled with the anthropological tasks of the present film genre theory. The article also explains how this intersects with the analysis of genre discourses.

Keywords: film genre theory, genre studies, media studies, genre criticism, anthropological tasks, genre discourses

Paul Young

Paul Young is director of film studies and assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (2006) and is currently writing Mobilizing Pictures: Realism, Transformation, Early American Cinema. His article, “Telling Descriptions: Frank Norris's Kinetoscopic Naturalism and the Future of the Novel, 1899,” appeared in Modernism and Modernity (2007).

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