Splitting Genre – simplified literary taxonomy

I’m speaking specifically about the term “Genre”. Art, as things categorized by humans, has many difficulties that other things don’t have — what do I mean by other “thing”, well let’s take the taxonomy of living organisms as an example

Which shows this simple classification structure. At the root you have life, which gets divided into domains based on cell types — resulting in the domains of Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya, which is then divided into Kingdoms (Animals, Plants, Fungi etc.)

At any rate you get the point. Here is a similar graphic showing the common classification system used for Aesthetic productions.

If you think this unfair — here is the definition of Genre

In the description it says

…the main genres of classical music would include symphonies, sonatas, and opera, and the major genres of literature would include novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. But within the category of novels, we could also say that detective novels, sci-fi novels, romance novels, and young-adult novels are separate genres.

So big genres have little genres inside ‘em…which makes talking about literature or really any form of art difficult when we get to the matter of categorization, in the taxonomy of life you always know what you are talking about because things have different names for the category they belong to, but in discussing genre are we talking about the big overarching genres like Literature, or Painting, or the pretty big but limited to one particular form of art — like a Novel or a Poem, or some lower down the tree genre like science fiction or gothic horror.

As this situation is untenable it is the habit of everyone to use genre only as the lower levels — so if someone says genre they mean dystopian science fiction, Gothic Horror or things at that level and not Novels or Poetry. And while Genre also applies to painting and other non-literary arts it’s real world use is generally only in relation to the literary — which makes things a little bit more manageable.

But not manageable enough I’m afraid.

So in order that we have some way of referring to different levels of art in the future, I will put this extremely simplified taxonomy (I could make it more complicated, and may in some later essay, but this is the just the minimal viable taxonomy here)

Simplification

I have significantly simplified the relation of these things to each other, for example this simplified taxonomy has removed fiction and non-fiction as categories. A short explanation of why I have done it this way is that currently I need some way of dealing with Genre for a future article, and this fits my needs, but also because of course that a taxonomy of art really requires a different visualization method, which is more like a living family tree, if the family was the crowned heads of Europe and the tree was able to show the transference of dominions between great families by intermarriage.

As making such a visualization is a different project, it will have to wait, and thus we have this quick splitting up of the literary art suitable to my needs.

So, in this simplified taxonomy — Art is the kind of art — is it literary, graphic, and so forth (I will not list all these types of art here, just that we understand what level we are talking about when we say an art)

Form is for formats of art, let us suppose the art we discuss is Literary — then the forms would be Novels, Poems, Short Stories, Essays and so forth.

Purpose is what affective purpose the art has — this means is it a comedy, is it a drama, is it educational, is it a horror, is it speculative, is it fantastical. That is to say what result does it hope to get from its audience.

Finally we get to Genre, and this is essentially what tropes are put together to achieve the purposes of the literary form.

With such a simplified taxonomy we can use the term genre and be understood as referring to what people generally mean when they use the term genre — is it a time travel fiction, is it a supernatural monster tale, and so forth.