Midterm Review

• Define Mimesis

• Mimesis: representation as a process of mirroring or imitating the real. Social construction theorists criticize mimesis for not taking into account the way in which systems of representation shape how we interpret and understand what we see

• What is the relationship between sign, signifier and signified?

• Sign=signifier+signified

• Signifier (word/image/object)

+

Signified (mental concept of the referent)

=Sign (meaning)

-Signifiers have different meanings in different concepts

Ex. Cigarette in film=friendship/romance

Cigarette in antismoking ad=death

• The signified of a smiley face is happiness

• Image of a smiling face makes the sign of smile=happiness

Image Analysis

• Denotative and Connotative meanings: define each, and apply to the above image

Different kinds of signs

• Symbolic: signifier does not resemble the signified; arbitrary association

• Iconic: signifier resembles the signified

• Indexical: signifier is directly connected in some way to the signified

Ex. Handprints on a cave wall

• Example of an Iconic Image: signifier=the cartoon of Harper, signified=Harper; the signifier resembles the signified

Example of an Indexical sign: signifier was present in the same time/place as the the signified, they are physically and directly connected

Define Kitsch

• Kitsch: images and objects that are trite, mass produced, sentimental and formulaic; cheap and gaudy versions of classical beauty

• They gain value because they’re recognized as iconic of a historical moment when everyday life was saturated with cheesiness

• Interpellation:

Cultural products address their consumers and recruit them into a particular ideological position. Images designate the kind of viewer they intend us to be, and shape us as ideological subjects.

bricolage

• Things put to uses for which they were not originally intended and in ways that dislocate them from their normal/expected context

Appropriation

• The act of borrowing/stealing other’s works/images to change the meaning by creating your own, or changing the context

The Gaze

• Complex field of exchanges between the subject and image/object

• The subject is caught up in dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people

Laura Mulvey: feminist film theorist

• Scopophilia: the drive to look and the general pleasure of looking at something

• Exhibitionism: the pleasure of being looked at/attracting attention

• Voyeurism: the pleasure in looking without being seen; associated with masculine viewer

• Define episteme

• Episteme: the ideas/ways of ordering knowledge that are taken to be true/accurate in a given era

• The way that an inquiry into truth is organized in a given era

• Ex. Linear perspective is a way of showing reality that was widely seen as true in a certain era