Genre and the Museum Exhibition

This paper applies a linguistic understanding of genre to the domain of museumexhibitions, interpreting these exhibitions as communicative texts. Genre will be seen
to be not just a useful metaphor, but an important analytical tool in approaching the
analysis of museum exhibitions as texts. Two concurrent exhibitions from a science
and technology museum are compared in terms of genre, and it is argued that genre
is a useful tool for identifying their distinctive social purposes. It is also noted that
the unique nature of these complex, three-dimensional, multimodal texts requires
some of the linguistic understandings of genre to be adapted. Connections are made
both ‘below’, to aspects of register variation, and ‘above’, to the ideological stance and
communicative potential of the museum as a whole as a communicative entity.