Wednesday, February 24, 2010
My Structuralism Group
As a contributor to my group, I emailed everyone videos and web links that I thought really helped to show the concept of the sign, signifier, signified, as well as the history of the concept. In the email i inserted youtube videos of a Baby Einstein video clip and a "Your Baby Can Read," clip. These shows children a word, the narrator says the word, and then there is a series of images related to the word in able to teach babies and toddlers the two part sign system. We all met as a group the day class was cancelled and spit out ideas for the presentation. I contributed a number of historical context, cultural import, and theoretical practice ideas and facts to Francesca to integrate into the powerpoint presentation. I also collected examples of signifiers with multiple possible signified images creating multiple examples of signs and then emailed them to Amy. Our group was very vocal and very open to listening to eachother's ideas.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Photo Story
The Old Woman Who Lived By the Sea
The old woman lived by the sea and no one knew her name. The town of Astoria, Oregon, was small and quiet, but that only made the old woman more mysterious. With a town so enclosed, there wasn’t a move you could make without your neighbor knowing. So this old woman made sure she had no neighbors, and settled in a house at the very tip of a cliff. The dark waves broke onto the cliff splashing upward like clawing arms. The sheer force must have rattled her house with every approach.
The sun never visited the old woman who lived by the sea, and some say that this slowly drove her mad. She only emerged from her weathered home when the rain spit so hard from the sky, that her emergence was invisible. She hid behind the raindrops, letting each one wash her away.
With a copper teapot in hand, she scuffled down the cliff, towards the rushing sea. On a washed up log she sat, alone and hidden, sipping chamomile tea with rose petals. On some days she lingered on the edge of her ceramic tea cups with spearmint and lemongrass or vanilla rooibus with apple slices.
Once the rain subsided, all that would be left on the old weathered log, was her empty, washed out tea cups. It would be the only sign to all the Astorians, that the woman who lived by the sea was still living on.
Semiotic Analysis
This photograph has four signifiers: “log,” “teacup,” “ocean” and “rain.” All of the signifiers have a common signified. Meaning that the internal image that comes to mind when we see or hear these words, is the same concept that everyone else sees. This is also arbitrary due to different cultures ideas of the signifier.
The creative narrative based on this photograph above was written by looking at the elements of the picture, without listing the images, but by defamiliarizing it. Subconsciously I wrote a story using the signified concepts I received mentally when I looked at the four signifiers. I didn’t do this on purpose because I was not familiar with the idea of Saussure’s semiology.
From a semiotic analysis the image of rain can symbolize doom, tragedy, or sorrow. The teacups are in pastel, feminine, and floral colors and patters. They have gold handles and are clean and in perfect condition. This gives the idea of someone from an older generation, most likely a woman. The ocean is blurred in the background and even though it is not the center of the attention of the photograph it still plays on the meaning behind the teacups. When you think of the beach, you don’t think of rain automatically, unless you think of Oregon or Washington. Those two states are the most wet places in America, and both have a coast facing the pacific ocean. So with those keys we piece together a sorrowful, elderly woman, drinking tea, in Oregon, by the ocean. The viewer may also guess that the woman is wealthy, because to live by the sea, especially with an ocean view, would mean someone of higher status and money.
The log gives us a place, where the woman and the teacups meet. It is the center setting of the photograph. The log is of pine or red wood which can be found in a conifer forest. This provides more evidence for the fact that this scene takes place up north. Southern California beaches are more common with palm trees rather than pine. All these elements play together to provide a deeper meaning of the picture to the viewer.
Rivkin, Julie & Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Formalism.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 4-6
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 14-21.
The old woman lived by the sea and no one knew her name. The town of Astoria, Oregon, was small and quiet, but that only made the old woman more mysterious. With a town so enclosed, there wasn’t a move you could make without your neighbor knowing. So this old woman made sure she had no neighbors, and settled in a house at the very tip of a cliff. The dark waves broke onto the cliff splashing upward like clawing arms. The sheer force must have rattled her house with every approach.
The sun never visited the old woman who lived by the sea, and some say that this slowly drove her mad. She only emerged from her weathered home when the rain spit so hard from the sky, that her emergence was invisible. She hid behind the raindrops, letting each one wash her away.
With a copper teapot in hand, she scuffled down the cliff, towards the rushing sea. On a washed up log she sat, alone and hidden, sipping chamomile tea with rose petals. On some days she lingered on the edge of her ceramic tea cups with spearmint and lemongrass or vanilla rooibus with apple slices.
Once the rain subsided, all that would be left on the old weathered log, was her empty, washed out tea cups. It would be the only sign to all the Astorians, that the woman who lived by the sea was still living on.
Semiotic Analysis
This photograph has four signifiers: “log,” “teacup,” “ocean” and “rain.” All of the signifiers have a common signified. Meaning that the internal image that comes to mind when we see or hear these words, is the same concept that everyone else sees. This is also arbitrary due to different cultures ideas of the signifier.
The creative narrative based on this photograph above was written by looking at the elements of the picture, without listing the images, but by defamiliarizing it. Subconsciously I wrote a story using the signified concepts I received mentally when I looked at the four signifiers. I didn’t do this on purpose because I was not familiar with the idea of Saussure’s semiology.
From a semiotic analysis the image of rain can symbolize doom, tragedy, or sorrow. The teacups are in pastel, feminine, and floral colors and patters. They have gold handles and are clean and in perfect condition. This gives the idea of someone from an older generation, most likely a woman. The ocean is blurred in the background and even though it is not the center of the attention of the photograph it still plays on the meaning behind the teacups. When you think of the beach, you don’t think of rain automatically, unless you think of Oregon or Washington. Those two states are the most wet places in America, and both have a coast facing the pacific ocean. So with those keys we piece together a sorrowful, elderly woman, drinking tea, in Oregon, by the ocean. The viewer may also guess that the woman is wealthy, because to live by the sea, especially with an ocean view, would mean someone of higher status and money.
The log gives us a place, where the woman and the teacups meet. It is the center setting of the photograph. The log is of pine or red wood which can be found in a conifer forest. This provides more evidence for the fact that this scene takes place up north. Southern California beaches are more common with palm trees rather than pine. All these elements play together to provide a deeper meaning of the picture to the viewer.
Rivkin, Julie & Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Formalism.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 4-6
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 14-21.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Heteroglossia
In Mikhail Bahktin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” he coins the term heteroglossia. So we start by breaking this term down. Hetero means “other” or “different, where the combining word gloss- can mean “word” or “speech,” like the term glossary. Heteroglossia: Other speech.
This is pretty much what Bahktin gets to in his essay. Heteroglossia refers to use of different languages, where languages can be the point of view of the narrator and the different dialogue of the characters. By creating a novel with heteroglossia, the text is able to be readable to many people and not just one particular group.
“Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permit’s a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different (always more or less dialogized.)…-this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel (Bahktin 263).
For example I use heteroglossia in my own life. As a Starbucks barista, I use one language with my customers, "Hello! How are you? What can I get for you today? Would you like anything to eat with your latte today Jim?" Then I switch to a different mode of language more suitable (and less fake) when talking to my coworkers: "Spencer can you check the bathrooms? Tuck in your shirt." My language becomes more choppy and I change my tone as if I was talking to one of my friends. The language I use with my mother is COMPLETELY different than the language I use around my father, and the language I use around my friends is EXTREMELY different than the language I use around my one year old son. We change our speech so that listener better understands us.
Living Without Heteroglossia:
In the comic, the platypus and the woman have nothing in common, and are using two differnt modes of language, both speaking on different subjects. This would be an example of a world without heteroglossia.
Bahktin's idea of heteroglossia is a mode of formalism that we can use to interpret the text. "The Russian Formalists were interested both in describing the genreal characteristics of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such language" (Rivkin 3).
Bahktin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.
This is pretty much what Bahktin gets to in his essay. Heteroglossia refers to use of different languages, where languages can be the point of view of the narrator and the different dialogue of the characters. By creating a novel with heteroglossia, the text is able to be readable to many people and not just one particular group.
“Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permit’s a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different (always more or less dialogized.)…-this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel (Bahktin 263).
For example I use heteroglossia in my own life. As a Starbucks barista, I use one language with my customers, "Hello! How are you? What can I get for you today? Would you like anything to eat with your latte today Jim?" Then I switch to a different mode of language more suitable (and less fake) when talking to my coworkers: "Spencer can you check the bathrooms? Tuck in your shirt." My language becomes more choppy and I change my tone as if I was talking to one of my friends. The language I use with my mother is COMPLETELY different than the language I use around my father, and the language I use around my friends is EXTREMELY different than the language I use around my one year old son. We change our speech so that listener better understands us.
Living Without Heteroglossia:
In the comic, the platypus and the woman have nothing in common, and are using two differnt modes of language, both speaking on different subjects. This would be an example of a world without heteroglossia.
Bahktin's idea of heteroglossia is a mode of formalism that we can use to interpret the text. "The Russian Formalists were interested both in describing the genreal characteristics of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such language" (Rivkin 3).
Bahktin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.
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