Preview
IB DP English A: Language and Literature | SL & HL | Area of Exploration 3: Intertextuality — Connecting Texts | Concepts: transformation, creativity, perspective
📋 What You Will Learn
- Define genre as a classification system and explain how conventions create a reading contract between writer and audience, including the concept of the reader's "horizon of expectation"
- Identify the key conventions of major literary genres (Gothic, Aristotelian tragedy, speculative fiction) and non-literary text types (newspaper, interview, advertisement)
- Explain the four main reasons why writers adhere to genre conventions, with Shakespeare and Brontë as anchored examples drawn from the course sources
- Analyse how and why writers subvert genre conventions for specific effects — ideological, aesthetic and commercial — with reference to Adichie, McCarthy, Achebe and non-literary case studies
- Trace how genre conventions evolve over time in response to shifting cultural, political and societal values, comparing Shelley's Frankenstein with McCarthy's The Road
- Apply this knowledge to Paper 1 (/20) unseen textual analysis and Paper 2 (/30) comparative essay planning, identifying where genre awareness earns marks under each criterion
🔍 Guiding Question If genre sets up a "contract" of expectations between writer and reader, what happens when a writer breaks that contract — and can that breaking itself become the most powerful meaning a text makes?
🌍 Why This Matters Every unseen text in Paper 1 belongs to a type — a speech, an advertisement, a poem, a newspaper front page — and recognising its genre conventions is the first analytical move available to you. But the most sophisticated answers go further: they notice when a text departs from convention and explain why . In Paper 2, genre subversion is often what makes studied works memorable and culturally significant. Being able to name this mechanism precisely, trace its effect on the reader, and explain the ideological stakes is the difference between a competent response and a Band 7.
1 · Defining Genre and the Convention "Contract"
📖 Definition — Genre A genre is a classification or category into which literary works and non-literary texts are grouped based on shared commonalities in form, content and style — including their use of specific literary features, their thematic focus and their contextual concerns. The word derives from the French for "kind" or "type"; synonyms include category, grouping, variety and style .
As the Hodder course companion (Tandy, Gibbons and Koszary) explains, when we place a text into a genre "we are placing them into a specific classification" and therefore "would expect the texts and works in this classification to share commonalities in form, content and style." This expectation is not trivial — it constitutes a reading contract .
📖 Definition — Convention A convention is a feature, structural pattern, stylistic choice or thematic element that readers have come to associate with a