« There is no sense in doing genre criticism; it would seem, without first constituting a corpus that is incontrovertibly generic. »

Common question we ask each other before going to the cinema or renting a movie are : “What sort of film shall we watch ? , What kind of film do you feel like seeing?” In making our selections, we might say things such as “I don’t like horror films, I’m not in the mood for drama, let’s watch a comedy”. These kinds of questions and statements identify, at least on an informal level, a film’s genre, a French term imported to film theory from literary studies and meaning type or class.
The result of such inquiries i.e. the choice of watching a thriller over a western, a comedy over a musical, a science fiction film over a crime movie is that we have particular likes and dislikes for certain types of films. This is exactly what producers need to take into account to make their product appealing to audiences.

I tried to point out in this paper, that Genre criticism relies first and foremost on a corpus which is “incontrovertibly generic” as Rick Altman says. However, to face today’s genre hybridisation the one who want to do genre criticism need to go beyond genre classification. Thus we could consider that using a corpus is the first step of genre criticism.

Genre criticism

a- Semantic and syntactic

One can call genre criticism what is more than listing similarities or differences among films. As Andrew Tudor says, “it becomes almost the end point of the critical process to fit a film into such a category. . . . To call a film a ‘Western’ is thought of as somehow saying something interesting or important about it”[1]. Rick Altman calls this approach to genre criticism the semantic approach—a focus on the more superficial aspects of films that fit into a given genre.
I imagine that a semantic examination puts the emphasize on the character types, aesthetics, plot lines, etc., which are common to the films.