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Phillip Le

Professor Gardiakos

ENC 1102

26 March 2020

Research Synthesis and Introduction

To be organized people categorize, and genre is a type categorization. Genre organizes

different art and literacy forms, so that people can easily find what they are looking for. If they

are looking for a book about the natural world, they would look for the non-fiction genre, and if

they were looking for a crime solving book, they would look for the mystery genre. The problem

is how accurately can different works be categorized under a genre, especially if the works came

from a different country. The cross-cultural intertextuality and different style of writing may

change the meaning or even cause confusion what genre the work can be labeled as, and the best

example of this is the American Western genre and the Japanese Samurai genre. The show The

Mandalorian is said to be an American western but the director’s inspiration for the work came

from old Samurai films. My hypothesis is that The Mandalorian’s genre would lean more

towards an old samurai film, but because of the translating of intertextuality people believed it to

be a western.

Many American directors were influenced by the Japanese Samurai genre and took it

upon themselves to recreate and even combine them with the American western genre. This is

where many issues arise and one of them being the misunderstanding of a samurai’s goal and

purpose (Kaminsky). The main purpose of a western film protagonist is usually more self-

serving. For example, the hero’s goal would usually be seeking revenge against the antagonist
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who has done something bad to them in the past and to win over the heroine (Hefner). The

Samurai, on the other hand, is not self-servant rather they follow their masters wishes.

The occurrence of misunderstanding a genre can come from many different places. Be it

a problem with the translation or even with genre itself. A study on intertextuality as translation

problem highlights how translating issues can occur (Kaźmierczak). A work may allude to

another work form their home country and when translated to another language there would be

an issue on how such an allusion would be translated. Should the translator keep the allusion

even though people from their country would not understand it or should they change it and

make it allude to a work that their reader would understand. The issue with the latter is that the

meaning behind the allusion can change, while the issue with the former is that the readers may

not even know there is an allusion because of lack of understanding. The study’s significance to

my own is that the director must be correctly interpreting the messages from the Japanese

Samurai film. If the Samurai film that inspired the director of The Mandalorian show had been

translated so that its messages and meaning can be understood by western audience, then the

meaning of these translated messages can be different and maybe what influenced the director.

This scenario is similar to what I mentioned before. A lot of directors misunderstand the purpose

and messages of samurai films, but the reason is not their own in this situation.

Another reason why someone can misinterpret a works genre is because of how a genre

is defined (Taracon). Genre can be defined by some characterized elements and vice versa; thus,

some works may have overlapping genres. An example from the study is a western and a

musical, the combination of the two genres should not be possible but it is. The study ties with

my own because for my research I am looking at why intertextuality is causing people to

misclassify a genre, while in this study it looks at why genre itself is a problem; thus, the reason
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why people misclassify genre is because of how genre itself is poorly defined. This leads to

another study by Duff; the study actually counters my claim. Duff claims that intertextuality can

be used to better classify genres because the current standard does not work. This would look at

the style, format, literary devices, etc. of the work in order to classify it. This creates more

specific genre categories and makes it harder to misclassify a genre, so intertextuality is actually

beneficial to categorizing genres.

Directors being influenced by a foreign film is nothing new. Similar to my own study, the

academic journal by James Bowman “The Good, The Bad, and The Japanese” goes how the

specific Japanese film “The Seven Samurai” had inspired the rise of a new type of protagonist. A

protagonist who is neither good or bad, but still stand between the innocent and those who seek

to abuse them. The journal explained “The Seven Samurai” protagonists and the setting of the

movie. They do this so they can compare it to western films and show how the western films

were influenced. This is somewhat similar to my own research. Except it is showing how a

Japanese samurai film inspired other western films. While I will be finding out what genre,

western or Samurai, an American film is inspired by.

A genre being defined by its rhetorical characteristics will be the bases of my study. By

doing this I can find characteristics found from each genre, western and samurai, and compare

them. As an American, I do not have a good perspective on Japanese samurai films and history

and would most likely misinterpret the purpose or goal of the story like some American directors

have done. This is why the academic journal by Lackney would be useful for me, it specifically

goes over Japanese samurai film characteristics and even compare them to other older Japanese

Samurai films. I will have a better understanding of Samurai film form a better perspective so

when I go over the rhetorical characteristics of the genre, I would be able to better identify them.
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A study on translating silence in Japanese to English will also refine my ability to characterize

the genre (Sumilang-Engracia). It explains how the translations cater towards the audience, and

the meaning of a scene can change because of it; thus, I will be more wary of translated phrases

that do not match with the typical characterization of samurai films.

For my study, the preparations to avoid misinterpretation of samurai films will be done

before anything else since the goal of my study is to understand why intertextuality can cause

people to misinterpret genre. The method of my research will involve me writing down the

characteristics of each genre, western and samurai. Next, I will watch western and samurai films

and compare to see if these characteristics are apparent in them and which are not. Then I will

watch The Mandalorian and for each episode write down whether or not it leaned towards a

western or more towards a Japanese samurai genre. By the end, I will compare which genre out

of the eight episodes had more influence on the show The Mandalorian.
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Work Cited

Bowman, James. “The Good, the Bad, and the Japanese: The Brilliant Director Akira Kurosawa,

of ‘Seven Samurai’ Fame, Helped Bring a New Kind of Hero to the American Movie

Screen, Writes James Bowman. Not so Much Film Noir as Film Gris.” The American

(Washington, DC), no. 7, 2007, p. 66.

Duff, David. “Intertextuality versus Genre Theory: Bakhtin, Kristeva and the Question of

Genre.” Paragraph, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, p. 54.

Kaminsky, Stuart M. “Comparative Forms: The Samurai film and the Western.” American Film

Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film. 

University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986, p.3 3-42.

Lackney, Lisa. "From Nostalgia to Cruelty: Changing Stories of Love, Violence, and

Masculinity in Postwar Japanese Samurai Films." Electronic Thesis or Dissertation.

University of Akron, 2010. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. P. 16-

32. Accessed 01 Mar 2020.

Marta Kaźmierczak. “Intertextuality as Translation Problem: Explicitness, Recognisability and

the Case of ‘Literatures of Smaller Nations.’” Russian Journal of Linguistics: Vestnik

RUDN, no. 2, 2019, p. 362.

Sumilang-Engracia, Erika Ann. FROM ASIAN TO AMERICAN: On Translating Silence in US

Film Adaptations of Japanese Movies. 2018, p. 33-54.