Genre
John Fiske - Genre as 'convenience' for producers and audiences - this means commercial success in underpinned by the conventions of genre of what audiences expect.
Robert Stam - There are infinite genres. Stam argues that genre no longer exists and we do not have to analyse text in terms of genre.
John Hartley - Genre is interpreted culturally, e.g. Coronation street/Easterners could only be understood in terms of the conventions of UK soap operas, and American television dramas tend to have a slightly different set of conventions to British television dramas.
Daniel Chandler - Genre is too restricting and presents audiences and producers with a creative 'straitjacket'.
Narrative
Goodwin - useful for analysing music video: through beats, narrative and performance, the star image, relation of visuals to the song and the technical aspects (composition) of a music video.
Propp - 8 character roles: only applies to mainstream texts e.g. blockbuster films or Disney films where characters often pertain to stereotype. Sometimes, however you can apply propp to running news stories by analysing a hero, villain, false hero, princess (prize), her father, doner, dispatcher, helper.
Roland Barthes - 5 narrative codes: Cultural, semantic, symbolic, hermeneutic, proairetic.
Levi-Strauss - Texts are often understood by the way things are placed in binary opposites to each other.
Representation
Tessa Perkins - Stereotyping has elements of truth and are based on repeated representation, both in society and within media.
Baudrillard - Representations are hyper real, often copies of copies and have lost meaning as a result.
Carol Clover -last girl theory: useful if analysing representation in horror films but mainly the sub genre of slasher horror.
Taijfel and Turner - Inter-group discrimination, useful for studying identities and the media and the idea of a collective.
Audience
Jeremy Tunstall - Audiences can be identified as primary, secondary or tertiary also the site or conditions of reception e.g. consuming media as a collective group of individually.
David Gauntlett - Producer as consumer (prosumer): thanks to digital media, many consumers of media as also producers e.g. YouTube as cultural phenomenon.
- Adorno – Passive consumption/Hypodermic model (Frankfurt School): old fashioned but still relevant – vulnerable audiences will always be passively affected by media texts.
