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Unit 4: Literary Texts, Contexts and Values
Quick questions on Genre and generic conventions: WACE Year 12 Literature Unit 4
2short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What are conventions create expectations?Show answer
Each genre carries conventions that prime the reader. Tragedy leads us to expect a fall and to read a protagonist's choices as steps toward it. The gothic primes us for dread, the uncanny, and settings that externalise inner states. Romance leads us to expect obstacles overcome and union achieved.
What is conforming, adapting, subverting?Show answer
A text that conforms to its genre uses the conventions straight, and even this is a choice with meaning, since fidelity to a form carries the form's values. A text that adapts the genre keeps its frame but alters its content, perhaps placing the gothic's dread in a domestic kitchen rather than a castle. A text that subverts the genre deliberately breaks the contract, giving tragedy a survivor or denying romance its union, and the broken expectation becomes the argument. The reader feels the absence of what the genre promised, and that felt absence carries meaning.
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