Semiotics Homework

Semiotics Homework 

1)   Two linguistic philosophers:

De Saussure and Pierce 

2)   Post-structuralism and structuralism. Structuralism was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in cultural products.

Studied by, De Saussure.

3)   The starting point, the particular methods of denotation and connotation are frequently used as a starting point for image analysis. Anchorage is a term used by Barthes to describe the ways in which words work upon certain visual texts

4)   The quest for meaning is at the heart of every human experience, ‘Semiotics is not just a technique that fictional detectives use to solve mysteries; it is an academic discipline in its own right that studies the most critical of all features of human sapience’.

5)    A variety of meanings can be interpreted depending upon the cultural position of the reader, i.e. age, class, ethnicity, life experiences. 

6)   Polysemic, an open text may have a variety of meanings dependent upon the age, sex and cultural background of the reader. Open texts tend to more highbrow, high culture whereas closed texts tend to more popular, mass culture e.g. mass media texts.

7)   Popular and mass culture e.g. mass media text are known as 

8)   Dominant - when the reader accepts the full preferred reading offered by the text.

9)   Negotiated - where the content of the message is adapted to fit the specific social condition of the reader to produce a new meaning. i.e. middle-class women may respond to advert portraying female as a sex object as OK but not for me, she may have other ideas on how to assert her independence/control.

10)Oppositional - where the dominant reading is contested and a reading which opposes it is produced. i.e. feminist may see the same image as degrading to all women and exploitative.

11)Text centred 

12)Some writers have argued that the dominant Hollywood perspective is male. Camera shots and editing combine to represent women as objects of the controlling male gaze. The audience are stitched in to ‘sexist’ positions as though they are ‘natural’ ways of perceiving reality.

13)Semiotics examines the study of life, the systems and their roles in construction and reconstruction of meaning.