2. Enforcing the concepts
Genre labeling
Putting a genre label on a product of fiction is convenient to bypass the difficulties in the fiction-reality discussion. You can stop thinking because the label says what it is and you know what to expect. Genre helps to reinforce your concepts and classifications. However, the genre discussion is a mine field of its own. There is quite some confusion about the epistemic meaning of ‘reality soap,’ ‘social realism,’ or ‘virtual reality.’ This chapter treats a number of issues in genre theory such as the dynamics of genre, its pragmatic use, and its relation to schemata and cognitive scripts. In addition, it presents a reality-based genre taxonomy to overcome the inconsistencies of individual genre labels and incorporates this taxonomy into the fiction-reality framework.