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What is Genre?

Genre is a foundational concept in the arts, referring to the categories and conventions that organize creative works — whether in literature, film, visual art, or performance. Students encounter genre across disciplines including literary studies, film studies, art history, and cultural criticism. What makes it academically interesting is the tension between genre as a stable set of rules and genre as a living, evolving form shaped by audience expectations, social context, and artistic innovation. The works and movements appearing in this body of student writing — from Rococo and Neoclassical painting to lowbrow art, from dime novels to Western film, from short fiction to hip-hop and street dance — reflect just how broadly genre operates across the arts.

The papers here approach genre from several distinct angles. Some take a comparative approach, placing two works or styles side by side to examine how each handles form and convention, as seen in analyses pairing short stories or contrasting artistic movements. Others focus on a single genre — the Western film, the crime novel, the short story — tracing its defining characteristics and cultural role. Case-study analysis is also common, with writers using a specific work or artist to illuminate broader genre questions. A few papers address how genre intersects with social change, looking at how shifting audiences and cultural moments reshape artistic categories.

A strong essay on genre establishes a clear, arguable thesis about what a genre does, not just what it is. Evidence drawn from close reading of specific texts, films, or artworks carries the most weight. One common pitfall is treating genre as a fixed checklist rather than a dynamic framework — strong essays acknowledge that the most interesting works often push against or redefine the conventions they inherit.

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Essay Undergraduate

Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic Style in The Fall of the House of Usher

Of all the authors to employ use of the Gothic style in their poetry or prose, none mastered the craft more than Edgar Allen Poe. The classic American fiction writer specialized in fostering a unique sense of dread and…

Essay Undergraduate

Second Grade Weather Thematic Unit: Science and Literacy

The proposed thematic unit is designed for a general education classroom at the second grade level. The suggested time frame is three weeks, but the unit could be either shortened slightly or extended by adjusting the number of activities. Reading activities include shared reading and self-selected reading from a variety of books provided by the teacher. The book selection should include multiple genres and multiple reading levels. A suggested list is included. Writing activities engage students in the five stages of the writing process. Students will create a weather journal that includes their writing and a reading log. Students may also include notes about weather observations.

Paper Undergraduate

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes — Documentary Review

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a documentary by Byron Hurt aims to investigate the underlying social issues that have permeated hip-hop and been propagated through the music and culture.

Paper Doctorate

The Importance of Being Earnest: Satire and Identity

Oscar Wilde wrote this play as a farce in part to poke fun at some of the Victorian attitudes during that era. He also was a gay man in an era when that wasn't totally acceptable, so the play takes on another level of interest because he was punished for his sexual behavior and had to move to Paris to find safe haven. Still, the play stands up well to any criticism because it is wildly absurd, the switching of character identities adds to the absurdity, and in the end everyone discovers who they really are.

Research Paper Doctorate

Music Censorship in Rock and Rap: History and Impact

Censorship Under the Guise of Protecting the Children

Research Paper Doctorate

Alexander the Great: Tyrant or Hero in Ancient Sources

¶ … life of Alexander the Great is one of the most well documented lives of the time and within all of that documentation there is a sense that Alexander was either a tyrant or a saint like human.

Research Paper Doctorate

Rap Music, Violence, and Expression: Causes vs. Effects

Rap music is a phenomenon that is unparalleled in America, at no other time has a music form risen in such a way and gripped a nation as fully. While, rap music has its roots in the ghettos of the U.S.A.

Paper Doctorate

Auteur Theory in French New Wave and Italian Neorealist Film

Movies can be classified in many different ways and foreign films are usually overloioked in the United States. This paper is the result of two questions. The first asks about the auteur theory of film and whether the two films listed were a part of that school and how the directors of the two films used similar styles. The second question has to do with Italian neorealism and how the two films in this discussion received accolades despit low viewership.

Research Paper Doctorate

Structural and Thematic Review of Scorsese's The Color of Money

Structural and Thematic Review of Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money"

Paper Undergraduate

How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth: A Critical Review

Fee and Stuart in "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth", show the applicability of the Bible and provide readers with the tools of applying the Bible to their contemporary lives. For them there is no "then and there" to the text, rather than "then and there" of the text can equitably be applied to the "here and now" of contemporaneous living. The authors in effect build two bridges; there is the bridge between Church and lay man and the bridge between Church and exegetical scholar. Whilst the exegetical scholar approaches the text from the past trying to see ‘what it meant", the author tell us that the text is far more than that: it is applicable not only for the "then" but also for the "now" and, therefore, people should approach it with the intent of ‘what does it mean" and "what will it mean". In other words, each of us, regardless of scholarly background, should connect the '''then and there' of the original text to the 'here and now' of our own life settings" (p. 10). The operative premise is that the texts of the living Word "mean what they meant" (p. 11).

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