English 178 Notes
Text and Context:
Content: Dr Daniel Roux Lectures
Lecture 1:
● Communicating with the dead/past; expanding our experience of the world; confronting reality in a
visceral way; reading for pleasure.
● What makes a poem a poem? Figurative language, feelings, emotions provoked, ‘deeper
meanings’ don’t define poetry. Does a writer need to intend for something to be a poem for it to
be a poem? We no longer consider the intention of the author very important because we can
never fully know the intention of the author, or will never receive a satisfactory answer.
Sometimes things are created unintentionally or unconsciously; the fact that we remember it is
significant - we recognise the beautiful confluence of form and meaning.
● Anything’s a poem if we make it a poem: it’s not about how it’s written, it’s about how it’s read,
and reading for patterns; poetry is patterned speech (there is even significance in there being no
pattern)
● Different poems will be understood in different ways in relation to a specific context; associations.
● To unpack the meaning of the poem, we have to be very specific, otherwise nuance will be lost,
and ask: what do these metaphors do that no other metaphors will do?
○ Patterns of similarities: small, fragile - making us think of boxing in an unusual way
(called defamiliarisation); common ‘b’ sound, comparative ‘like’, sentence structure
○ Patterns of contrast: peaceful vs aggression and pain; 6 syllables vs 4 syllables, slow
pace of first line due to diftongs vs faster pace in second line
○ This conveys that there is an art to boxing, and that you don’t have to be big to box;
boxers can be vulnerable; balancing peace and violence, combination of contrasting
elements
○ Lines sound like/reflect their content
● Poetry is when language comes closest to music.
● Asking: would the poem make sense if we didn’t know it was about boxing? The context and
author play an important role; but also people felt that there was meaning beyond than boxing
and that’s why it became so well-known
Lecture 2:
● Literary patterns invite a reading; context invites us to read things very differently
, ● When you think of something, you will immediately think of all the connotations you unconsciously
hold; brain neurons will make complex connections (“By Heart: brain activation by poetry”)
● Points of studying literary texts:
○ Texts can be analysed by looking for patterns.
○ Texts are human artefacts that make meaning - create symbolic meaning and textual
references that go beyond what is pictorially depicted.
○ Texts have a reciprocal relation to the world - language goes beyond merely a description
of the outside world (mimetic function - copying reality); gives us an advantage in natural
selection (e.g. we know what is good and bad through language) BUT texts also create
the world we see; they are prescriptive; new ways of understanding and seeing are born
■ Concepts like patriotism, love etc are in fact just generally agreed upon terms
embedded in cultural understandings which in some sense also create the things
they describe.
Semiotics of the media: key concepts / critical language in analysing visual media (process more NB than
the content)
● A SIGN is anything that we decide stands for something other than itself (e.g. talking about a tree
when there is no real tree in the room). Signs generate meaning in a semiotic system; they are
ubiquitous.
● They consist of a signifier and a signified (mental image you link to something; can differ slightly
between people), linked by a social convention - different from the referent (the actual thing).
● In modern publications, signs are multimodal; different kinds of semiotic systems (video, audio,
reading etc)
○ E.g. “Given - new / then - now”: the convention that what happened earlier is on the left
and what is later is on the right; there is no natural order that tells us this, it is just what
we have assigned to these signs.
● What are these images supposed to say; what feelings and connotations are they invoking; what
do they include and leave out etc
Lecture 3: Semiotics of media texts:
● Texts have a reciprocal relation to the world – in other words, if they reflect the world but they
also impose meaning on the world; they don’t merely represent, they also construct our
understanding of reality.
, ● When we read a text, we are interested in the ways in which the text reflects, produces and/or
contests cultural values and beliefs – i.e. amongst other things, we look at the ideological
dimension of the text.
Semiotics/Semiology:
● The most important figure in the development of semiotics is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
In his Course in General Linguistics, published in 1916, he writes: “It is possible to conceive of a
science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social
psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek
semeîon, ‘sign’). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them.”
● Semiotics, or semiology, is in other words the study of signs.
Sign/Signifier/Signified:
● A sign is anything that represents something else. Thus a picture of a tree is a sign for a tree (the
referent), a knock at the door stands for someone desiring to enter the room, the word “river”
substitutes for its referent, a river, and so on. Signs always consist of a signifier and a signified.
The signifier is a material representation (a written word, a sound, a visual image) and the
signified is the mental concept evoked by the signifier. For Saussure, the signifier and signified
are inseparable. One should not confuse “signified” with “reality”. This is especially obvious in
abstract concepts like “patriotism” or “love”, where the signifiers in fact point to socially mediated
discursive constructs (e.g. what our parents told us about patriotism, what we saw about love on
TV).
Multimodality:
● Refers to the truth value or reliability of a representation/message: how realistic something is;
high (greater truth; realism; e.g. a scientific graph that makes a strong truth claim or an image
rooted in realistic context) or low modality; high modality texts have background and movement
that move us to ask questions about context, time period etc.
● Increasingly, texts employ different modalities simultaneously or in sequence. Thus a TV
newscast requires us to engage simultaneously with visual texts, both still and animated, written
text scrolling across the screen, and a soundtrack. The mass media relies very heavily on visual
signs: hence conventional “monomodal” literacy is no longer sufficient to understand the mass
media; we also need to be able, for instance, to decode visual “grammar”.
● High/Low Modality:
○ Reliability is, of course, to a large extent culturally determined and always relative. In
linguistics, “modality” often relates to auxiliary verbs like “might”, “must”, “should”, and so
on; “it might rain” has low modality (it is not necessarily true), while “it will rain” has high
modality.
, ○ In the Western tradition of visual texts, photographs seem more “true” than cartoons, so
photographs are generally seen to possess “high modality”. In a scientific community,
certain kinds of diagrams might have “high modality” (they seem true): in other words,
modality depends strongly on context. When looking at photographs, a blurred sepia-tone
photograph will have lower modality than a focused colour photograph, etc.
Actors and Goals:
● In a picture, the actor corresponds to the subject of a grammatical sentence and the goal to the
object. In a picture of a man shooting at a deer with a rifle, the man is the actor and the deer is
the goal. The actor is an agent that instigates movement in a picture, or the person or thing from
which a vector emanates.
● A picture with both an actor and a goal is transactional. When the actor is present but not the
goal, the picture is non-transactional (e.g. person looking off into the distance and we can’t see
what they are looking at); rather like transitive and intransitive verbs.
● When a vector is formed by a gaze (i.e. when someone is looking at someone in a picture), the
person who is looking can be referred to as a reacter and the landscape, visual proposition or
participant that is being looked at can be referred to as a phenomenon.
● In a picture where the phenomenon is outside the picture (i.e. a picture of somebody looking at
something outside the frame), we can talk about a non-transactional reactional process. Pictures
that include both the reacter and the phenomenon are transactional.
Carriers and Attributes:
● Some pictures do not have actors and goals, but rather carriers and attributes. Here the picture
does not refer to an action performed by its participants – instead, the participants merely stand
for a larger whole; carriers are passive objects.
○ Often participants in a picture fulfill both the role of an actor and a carrier in a picture.
○ E.g. a picture of an Afrikaner farmer in a textbook about “the people of South Africa”
would fulfill the role of carrier in the sense that he simply represents the supposed
“attributes” of a particular type. Similarly, pictures of women with glossy, beautiful hair of
different colours in an advertisement for a home hair colouring kit are not really actors but
carriers: they “carry” the attributes of people who use the hair-colouring kit.
Framing, Anchoring, Juxtaposition:
● What is included in and what is excluded from a picture both determine how we read it; there are
always choices involved - depictions create mediated versions. All pictures are compelled to
frame the reality that they depict, and the location of the frame will be based on the intention and
location of the producer and, of course, the limitations of the technology being used.
