Theory of Genre

John Fiske develops Barthes semic code:
A representation of a car chase only makes sense in relation to all the others we have seen - after all, we are unlikely to have experienced one in reality, and if we did, we would, according to this model, make sense of it by turning it into another text, which we would also understand intertextually, in terms of what we have seen so often on our screens. There is then a cultural knowledge of the concept 'car chase' that any one text is a prospectus for, and that is used by the viewer to decode it, and by the producer to encode it.
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Jacques Derrida proposed that:
'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text' (1981)
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Claude-Levi Strauss developed the concept of bricolage.
Levi-Strauss saw any text as constructed out of socially recognisable ‘debris’ from other texts. He saw that writers construct texts from other texts by a process of:
Addition
Deletion
Substitution
Transposition
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Gerard Genette developed the transtextuality and developed five sub-groups, but only 4 apply to film:
-Intertextuality quotation, plagiarism, allusion
-Architextuality designation of the text as part of a genre by the writer or by the audience
-Metatextuality explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text
-Hypotextuality the relation between a text and a preceeding hypotext - a text or genre on whichit is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation)