Genre

Historians of genre note the long existence of genre in human signifying practices (e.g., Frow 2015, Bawarshi and Reiff 2010). They look back to the ancient distinction between the Sacred and Profane, and refer to scholars such as Plato and Aristotle and distinctions between the lyric, epic and dramatic poetry, but where Aristotelean categories tend towards the ontological, assuming stability in the categories, some level of exclusivity, clear boundaries and fixed, essential permanence, genre is now seen in a different light and scholars of genre recognise that genre is more fluid, permeable, changeable and not always agreed upon. This article explores some of the issues that are addressed across the literature, drawing from literary theory and rhetorical genre studies in particular, and considers genre as knowledge organization and the ways in which genre has been used in knowledge organization.