Genre and Intertextuality

Genre

In the dictionary, genre is defined as 'a style or category of art, music, or literature'. According to Carolyn Miller (1984); 'the number of genres in any society... depends on the complexity and diversity of society’. Therefore genre develops alongside society, with the increase of technology and the media, genres have expanded to not only comedy or romantic, but now we have 'romcoms' which is the mixture of both.

The genre of my multimodal text is Children's Fiction; this genre includes child appropriate content. The fact that it's fiction means that it can include realistic fiction; an event that could not happen today but may happen in the future, for example; man being able to go into space would have been realistic fiction back before the 70's. It can also include non-realistic fiction which is an event that could never happen, commonly includes technology that is impossible to create or another type of life form, such as an alien. 

The reason why my text is children's fiction is because it includes child appropriate content so it includes imagination, also fiction such as an alien and a dinosaur. It is also set in school which is recognisable to children with characters such as a dinner lady, head teacher, teacher and librarian which a child grows up with, therefore the setting is very relate-able to a child. 

Intertexuality

Nikolajeva and Scott (2006) describe intertexuality as referring to 'all kinds of links between two or more texts: irony, parody, literary and extraliterary allusions, direct quotations or indirect references to previous texts'. In this sense then my text does contain a case of intertexuality as during one of the scenes Annabelle; the main character, discovers a snake in the girls toilets so decides to attack it, which ends up the headteacher catching her and another student wet through. To try and show the attack without words I decided to use a clip from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where Harry has to kill this huge snake, by using this clip it adds irony and parody to the text because I am relating the imagination of a normal school girl to the story of a magical wizard in the School of Hogwarts of witchcraft and wizardry. By adding a video clip to my presentation also ensures that my text is a multimodal text; a text with many different types of material which produce meaning; for example a red picture to show warning or loud bang to show an accident.

References

Miller, C. R. (1984). “Genre as social action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2): 151– 67

Nikolajeva, M & Scott, C. (2006) How Picturebooks Work. London: Routledge