Genre expectations and discourse community membership in listener reviews of true crime-comedy podcast My Favorite Murder

Abstract

Genre definitions by Swales (1990) and Miller (1984) include the communicative purpose of a text as an indicative feature of its genre. Genre studies have also identified how expert members of discourse communities possess professional expertise in genre styles. This article shows that beyond discourse community expert members, ordinary audiences also have conceptions of genre and use those conceptions to evaluate texts. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of listener reviews of the true crime-comedy podcast My Favorite Murder, the analysis shows that negative reviews view the true crime-comedy categorisation as two separate genres, evaluating the podcast based on expectations of true crime and expectations of comedy. Positive reviewers accept the true crime-comedy genre as a new, mixed genre and evaluate the podcast from an in-group perspective, identifying themselves as members of the My Favorite Murder discourse community. Through this analysis, I show that audiences implement some form of genre analysis in text evaluations and that membership of the discourse community influences how they apply genre expectations to evaluations of texts.