ABSTRACT
This chapter develops concern with texts, drawing upon skills of rhetorical and semiological analysis. It considers the conventions and broader systems of meaning that order media texts in terms of genre analysis, and the way in which stories are ordered as narrative at rhetorical and semiological levels. Genre is a French word for ‘kind’, ‘category’ or ‘type’. Its root resembles other words in English such as ‘gene’, ‘genotype’ and ‘gens’ – the Roman word for a group of families with common ancestors. Genre critics in our field of study think about texts within any one medium – newspapers for instance – in a variety of ways, and use a range of terminologies including those from rhetoric, aesthetics, semiology and media professions. Work on narrative and narration has been developed in a number of academic disciplines and subjects – including literary studies, anthropology, psychology and film studies.
