Genre Research Process So Far

For this lit review, I'm researching two main bodies of work:

1. genre as it pertains to literature and writing in school, and
   
2. genre as it pertains to films and filmmaking

To begin a search for published research in the first category, I manually searched article titles for the past ten years (1999-2008) of Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ) for references to genre. I then searched the same time period in Research in the Teaching of English (RTE). I chose the ten year span because I wanted to capture the most recent research on this topic. I plan to review the references in the articles captured through this search to identify seminal pieces from before the ten year period. RRQ and RTE are top tier education research journals and should contain references to other work that will pertain.

To begin a search on the second category, I spoke to the research librarian for education at the USF library. We tried several searches, refining down to a search using Google Scholar (Advanced: contains "genre" AND exact phrase "film studies", 1999-2008). One of the articles produced from that search is Mittell 2001, published in Cinema Journal. That article referenced a book, Film/Genre by Rick Altman, which Mittell identifies as the key work done in examining genre as a discursive practice. Mittell also refers to Jane Feuer's essay in Channels of Discourse as the "most comprehensive discussion of television genre theory".


From here, I will move forward from Mittell 2001 to see what subsequent works cite him and return to the original search results. I also may do a title search, similar to those done for RRQ and RTE, in Cinema Journal and another journal suggested by the earlier search results. I also have to continue tracking down resources for the literature/writing side of the lit review.