Media, genres, facts and truth: revisiting basic categories of narrative diversification

Abstract

For all its theoretical prominence, medium remains an elusive concept, because it is not an analytic category created by theoreticians to serve a specific purpose, but a word of natural language, and like most of the words of language it has multiple senses. One way to address the issue of media is through their relations to other concepts. In this article I focus on genres, facts and truth as bearers of particularly important relations to media for both epistemological and narratological reasons. In contrast to models that regard genres as members of a system distinguished from each other through homogeneous criteria, I conceive individual genres as elements of an unstructured, expandable, heterogeneous and ever-changing list. In this approach, genres are defined positively—by their semantic content, their formal rules, or their pragmatic function—and new genres develop when new needs arise for communication. Media can be defined as distinct modes of communication, while genres are distinct forms of expression within media. But this distinction does not offer a fool-proof criterion of distinction, and it is often difficult to distinguish media from genres, especially in digital textuality. Truth, or more precisely the ability to claim truth, is not a property common to all members of a certain medium, but rather one that creates distinctions within media, as well as between them. Language-based media, film, photography and audio recording have the greatest power to claim truth: language-based ones, because they can articulate propositions; recordings, because they are based on mechanical capture of auditive or visual data that exist in the world. But most media can be used to tell either factual or fictional stories (with some exceptions discussed in the paper). This variability does not occur on the level of genre: all texts of the same genre share the same status with respect to truth and fictionality.