The Microgenre

A Quick Look at Small Culture

Anne H. Stevens, Molly C. O'Donnell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501345821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Everybody knows, and maybe even loves, a microgenre. Plague romances and mommy memoirs. Nudie-cutie movies, Nazi zombies, and dinosaur erotica. Baby burlesks, Minecraft fiction, grindcore, premature ejaculation poetry...microgenres come in all varieties and turn up in every form of media under the sun, tailor-made for enthusiasts of all walks of life. Coming into use in the last decade or so, the term "microgenre" classifies increasingly niche-marketed worlds in popular music, fiction, television, and the Internet. Netflix has recently highlighted our fascination with the ultra-niche genre with hilariously specific classifications -- "independent supernatural dramedy featuring a strong female lead" – that can sometimes hit a little too close to home. Each contribution in this collection introduces readers to a different microgenre, drawn from a range of historical periods and from a variety of media. The Microgenre presents a previously untreated point of cultural curiosity, revealing the profound truth that humanity's desire to classify is often only matched by the unsustainability of the obscure and hyper-specific. It also affirms, in colorful detail, what most people suspect but have trouble fathoming in an increasingly homogenized and commercial West: that imaginative projects are just that, imaginative, diverse, and sometimes completely and hilariously inexplicable.

1

Introduction

Molly C. O’Donnell and Anne H. Stevens

Everybody knows, and maybe even loves, a microgenre, though we might not know it by this exact name. Like one-hit wonder musicians, microgenres can be overnight sensations that vanish as quickly as they appear, or they can develop gradually, collecting ever-nuanced attributes only to be folded into broader and more recognizable categories later on. “Microgenre” as a term associated with the digital age has come to popularity in describing television streaming algorithms, digital musical phenomena, and self-published fiction available on Amazon. In this context microgenre refers to the classification of increasingly niche-marketed worlds in popular music, fiction, television, and the internet. Netflix has highlighted our fascination with the ultra-niche genre with hilariously specific classifications—“independent dramedy featuring a strong female lead”—that can sometimes hit a little too close to home. The streaming giant has identified 76,897 different microgenres in its algorithms and has used them to great effect in developing hit new series like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.¹ On Amazon you can find categories as microscopic as dinosaur erotica (sample title: Ravished by the Triceratops) and quilting cozy mysteries (sample title: Quilt or Innocence: A Southern Quilting Mystery), while the worlds of electronica and metal can be parsed into dozens of sub-sub-subgenres.

Usages of the term predate the digital age, however. In many ways, popular culture has always relied on hyper-specific formulas and subgenres. Jonathan Goodwin asserts in his contribution here on machine-classification that microgenres are inherently digital, but he does identify several usages of the term “microgenre” in critical works of the 1980s and 1990s, where writers use it as a way to characterize subgenres of a high degree of specificity. Even earlier, a French article about historical fiction from 1975 distinguishes “microgenre” and “macrogenre”: a microgenre is a more narrowly defined group of texts connected in time and space, whereas a macrogenre is more diffuse and thus harder to generalize about, for instance, historical novels of the era of Walter Scott versus historical novels more broadly construed or the female gothic novels of the 1790s as compared to the long-ranging and multifaceted tradition of the gothic writ large.² Many if not most of the chapters in this collection focus on microgenres that also participate in larger macrogenres—from Paul Hay’s look at a subset of the epigrammatic tradition to Mary Thompson’s focus on a small slice of the larger world of memoirs.

While the chapters in this collection testify to the fact that the concept of the microgenre, though it has gained prominence in the digital age, can be applied fruitfully to all eras of cultural production, what has changed in the world of the twenty-first-century microgenre perhaps has to do with speed and familiarity. The rapidity of classification, as contributors Elyse Graham and Michelle Taylor note in their treatment of fanfiction, means “readers and writers arrive at new sets of generic expectations … not over the course of years, but over the course of months or even days.” Genre becomes a function of classification where “constraint is not a limitation … But rather a core characteristic.” The creation of post hoc genres based on more random or less familiar elements is, as Goodwin observes, “not necessarily the type of observation that could have come to mind before computerized classification was done.” So although the concept of the microgenre as a highly specific generic phenomenon is not new, the unique iterativeness of microgeneric formation means we are more keenly aware of them in our era of cultural supersaturation.

This awareness has sparked those like digital humanities scholar Ted Underwood to observe that “the concept of the ‘microgenre’ is one of the salient critical innovations of the twenty-teens.”³ Microgenres offer unique frameworks for thinking about classification and historical organization in formally, historically, and theoretically nuanced ways. Pinpointing the existence of highly specific categories helps bring to the forefront relations of resemblance, the role of imitation, and the role of genres as marketing categories. Smallness allows us to see the effects of genre in all their glorious iterations: authors trying to “get in” and “get out,” readers with little time on their hands enjoying the shorthand that generic specificity provides, readers with too much time on their hands reveling in the familiar, scholars becoming more aware of the process of experimentation in its failures and victories.

“There is such a thing as being too seamless,” writes Wai Chee Dimock, “wrapping up too soon, and missing out on the unsettled vitality of rough edges.”⁴ Rough edges can be valuable, in considering both what is particular and what might be generalizable. Rough edges are, however, also often difficult to square with the human tendency to classify into neat categories. There is no place where this difficulty is more observable than in the study of genre. That the hyper-specific is often unsustainable is a fact that fails to either prevent attempts at classification or stop the niche from influencing longer and larger trends.

Yet one question comes to mind more than any other when we think of genre: What is the utility of thinking about works from novel generic perspectives? Or as Goodwin puts it, “What use is [the microgenre] as a critical category?” As Ralph Cohen writes in Genre Theory and Historical Change, “The problem … is not whether genre hypotheses are useful, but what uses they serve.”⁵ In other words, the question isn’t whether a critic has gotten to the “true” definition of a genre or properly categorized a work. Genres can function as archetypes, transhistorical categories, or macrogenres like Northrop Frye’s comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire. By contrast, microgenres are flexible, provisional, and temporary, used by each of the chapters in this collection as a means to make micro-connections among cultural artifacts, drawn from a range of historical periods and from literature, film, music, television, and the performing and fine arts. Here, the chapters reflect the wide range of uses to which the concept of the microgenre can be applied. We’ve arranged the chapters in this collection in a rough chronological order and also sometimes grouped them by medium (film, music, art). Though most of our pieces come from U.S.-based scholars, the topics covered include some geographic range, from the United States and Mexico to Britain, France, and Germany and from the ancient Mediterranean world to our contemporary globalized society. It is our hope that future work on microgenres would expand upon this range to include even more diverse and global perspectives.

The most useful thing about examining the small in this way is something it’s easy enough to lose sight of: complexity. Cultural history looks different depending on the degree of granularity of the genre-systems investigated. The terrain of the nineteenth-century novel takes on new contours if one focuses not on the broad and well-established categories of realism, the gothic, the sensation novel, but instead more closely scrutinizes literary clusters like the tales-novels, anesthesia fiction, or magic-portrait fiction. In order to demonstrate a bit of the complexity that scale affords small genre studies, this survey brings together small-scale areas of cultural production that serve different cultural purposes. As our first contributor Paul Hay observes of his microgenre, “The survival of these [works] into the modern period … is made possible by the transmission of anthologies.” The micro is, by its very definition, small in scale and hence under the radar of grand narratives of cultural history. Without inclusion in a work of this type, these creations of cultural production would be lost or at least forgotten. While this may not be seen as a tragic circumstance, with the loss of a microgenre comes a loss of nuance. The oversimplification of generic classification neglects forces of influence as it negates unexpected and fruitful interpretation with the potential to dash readerly expectations, as contributor Christopher Vilmar points out that the premature ejaculation poem confounds readers accustomed to thinking of “back in the day” solely in prudish terms.

Explorations of microgenres can help to fill out the picture of a particular historical moment, while at other times they help to show lines of influence or to trace an under-regarded stage of development in a larger genre. In some cases the study of the forgotten works of a microgenre helps to shed light on the horizon of expectations for a more canonical work. Contributor Alistaire Tallent’s discussion of prostitute memoirs places Sade’s Juliette at the end of a long and female-centric tradition; Diana Bellonby’s careful tracing of magic-portrait fiction highlights the subversive ways Oscar Wilde plays with the tropes of the microgenre in The Picture of Dorian Gray; Gavin Hurley’s treatment of the Italian giallo films demonstrates their connection to American slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. Other explorations of microgenres help to make sense of forgotten corners of the archive that don’t necessarily link up to more canonical works or genres, such as John Hay’s discussion of American topographical reports: the aesthetic and literary in the unexpected area of government reports. These types of generic explorations tell alternate tales of microgeneric making. Megan Becker-Leckrone points out how “Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animation drove the antic absurdism of Monty Python’s Flying Circus” that “draws deeply from familiar signs of Englishness—grangerism for a new century,” another example of a forgotten microgeneric history.

So what causes other microgenres to arise and coalesce? Some microgenres are established labels: Nora Gilbert’s chapter discusses how “Baby Burlesks” is the self-designated title of a series of Hollywood shorts; “Nudie-Cuties,” the subject of Cynthia Miller and Thomas M. Shaker’s chapter, similarly appears on the marketing poster for one of the earliest films discussed; fanfiction and musical microgenres (as treated by Graham and Taylor and Heather Lusty and Aurelio Meza, respectively) serve as identificatory markers, as metadata on fanfiction sites or as markers of particular musical scenes.⁶ In other cases our contributors are themselves inventing categories as a way to make connections. Danielle Kelly is tentative in her use of the term “Home Depot Art” but convincingly shows lines of connection among artists who work primarily with materials from big-box hardware stores. Likewise, Goodwin talks about the ways digital algorithms could help to identify new microgenres.

Some microgenres consist of creators responding to each other or to established templates, creating variations on a theme. In Paul Hay’s chapter, for example, epigrams describing a particularly realistic statue of a cow function as the ancient world equivalent of an internet meme. Similarly, premature ejaculation poetry and prostitute narratives offer us creators who seem to know what their genre “ought” to be, as Paul Hay observes, and “thus were perceived and shaped by a … tradition … consciously responding to the efforts of their predecessors.”

While it’s perhaps obvious how a creator might have mercenary motivations for participating in an established microgenre, there are other factors related to competition and community observable in the surveyed works. Writers of fanfiction, for example, talk about the nonmonetary rewards offered in the form of likes and views. Similarly, Becker-Leckrone’s discussion of the practice of cutting and pasting into printed books offers a portrait of the destruction of books as commodities, whereby we get an early example of the material equivalent of fanfiction, participants remixing and repurposing others’ creations. This stands in contrast to the idea of genre labels used merely as marketing categories. Even Paul Hay’s classical epigrams speak to noncommercial motivation and form, as there was no market for these works per se. Tallent’s discussion of prostitute memoirs reveals “a sense of community among producers and consumers … each one complementing the other,” just as Michael T. Wilson’s treatment of Minecraft fiction demonstrates the informal writing competition as incentive enough. Genre is often a means of continuing a conversation, either rapidly online or over time through “the use of intertextual signifiers,” as Paul Hay notes, “add[ing] additional nodes of connection.”

Other microgenres seem to be less fluid, tethered to particular moments of cultural anxiety or technological innovation. Exploring the possibilities and perils of new technology offers new distribution networks, as Matthew Duques discusses in his exploration of the neoclassical plague romance. Microgenres are sometimes means of coping with the present by learning from the past. Author Lydia Maria Child’s plague romance, for example, gives her nineteenth-century readers the historical setting of the final days of golden-age Athens as a means for antebellum America to consider its own cataclysmic moment in history in terms of the perils of both slavery and war. Jennifer Diann Jones talks about the ways Victorian writers imagined the dangerous possibilities of anesthesia in fictional form, “shortly after its discovery,” with the phenomenon disappearing “after the professionalization of medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” A similarly “of the moment” microgenre, video art is tied to the new technology of the camcorder and the new platform of cable access TV. Artists, writes Susanna Newbury, “inhabit[ed] television to leverage it to their own imaginative ends, as video art … not to see art on TV, but how to see TV, through art, as constructed medium.” Like many other microgenres presented in this collection that reflect particular historical circumstances, anti-sitcom video art is an example of medium inspiring message, a link between artistic possibility and consumable goods. John Carl Baker explores a perhaps less domesticated memory of the early 1980s when the threat of nuclear war seemed imminent and several made-for-television movies responded to this anxiety. Mary Thompson links the rise of the mommy memoir in the mid-1990s to a similar moment of contemporary concern, this time about motherhood in the context of third-wave feminism.

Themes of gender, sex, and sexuality arise in our contributors’ explorations of microgenres long before the late twentieth-century account offered in Thompson’s chapter, however. Many of the chapters discuss microgenres that revolve around erotic material, sometimes thinly disguised political metaphor and sometimes not. Vilmar’s discussion of poems about premature ejaculation and Tallent’s investigation of prostitute memoirs both point out the direct reference being made within the works to real historical figures. Here, sex is used as the less scandalous mode of critique in times where overt engagement in political intrigue often resulted in decapitation. Miller and Shaker’s tracing of the “nudie-cutie” film, on the other hand, and Gilbert’s discussion of the troubling “Baby Burlesks” series are more direct treatments of sex in the service of comedy. “Sex,” as Miller and Shaker observe of these films, “is a laughing matter.” Microgenres like “baby burlesks” seem to reveal a much more scandalous past, though, than general conceptions account for. Starring an, at the time, unknown Shirley Temple, “Baby Burlesks” depict explicit sexism and racism that is presented in more subtle ways in later Hollywood blockbusters featuring Temple. Yet sometimes what an exploration of microgenre reveals meets our expectations about time’s forward march toward the libertine perspective. Nudie-cuties and giallo films seem tame when set beside the graphic sexuality and violence of their successors in grindhouse pornography and slasher horror film.

Moving from the worlds of literature, film, and art to music, we are offered counterpoints. While Lusty outlines some of the key developments in fifty years of heavy metal, Meza looks more closely at a single musical movement. These chapters, once again, remind us that in popular media the term “microgenre” is most often associated with recent trends (think “witch house,” “seapunk,” and “vaporwave”).⁷ Both heavy metal and Mexican neo-surf also again offer us a contemporary illustration of communities of practice: fans and groups of creators making myriad microworlds within already niche areas that represent conversations between actors.

On a larger scale, we hope that this collected presentation of diverse microgenres reveals conversations like these. Our aim was to present previously untreated points of cultural curiosity in an effort to reveal the profound truth—that humanity’s desire to classify is often only matched by the unsustainability of the obscure and hyper-speci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Myron’s Cow Epigram
• 3 The Premature Ejaculation Poem
• 4 Prostitute Narratives of Ancien Régime France
• 5 The Neoclassical Plague Romance
• 6 Anesthesia Fiction
• 7 Magic-Portrait Fiction
• 8 Topographical Reports of the American Frontier
• 9 Grangerism
• 10 Shirley Temple’s “Baby Burlesks”
• 11 Nudie-Cuties
• 12 Giallo
• 13 Nuclear Realism
• 14 Anti-Sitcom Video Art
• 15 Home Depot Art
• 16 The Mommy Memoir
• 17 Minecraft Fiction
• 18 Heavy Metal Microgenres
• 19 Mexican Neo-Surf Microgenres
• 20 Fanfiction Microgenres
• 21 Machine-Classified Microgenres
• Index
• Imprint