Semiotics gives framework to understand the shifts in meaning of symbolic events. It gives method to study media represents events.

Why semiotics? Symbolism is hard to talk about, researchers need objectivity and distance when researching culture, and equips researchers with means to study cultural events.

"Consumers cannot see the culture they live in, until they are outside it." I agree and disagree. There is always the moment in a person's life when they see their lives through someone else's eyes, or learn how insignificant they are compared to the rest of the world. You don't necessarily have to be outside your culture to see this. Or I guess it depends on what "outside," means. Does it mean looking at your culture from another perspective, being against your culture, or physically leaving and seeing your culture from another place geographically?

Symbolism uses signification, denotation, connotation, and myth.

What would the traditional qualitative research include? How would it be different from semiotics?

Why would symbolism be hard to talk about? Do they mean explaining why Christmas is so special is hard to talk about because it is mostly the result of images and symbols that we have seen our entire lives?

Focused on magazines from the UK and Australia over three decades. What about the magazines are they expecting to change over time, or are they expecting them to stay the same?

So this article is mostly focusing on symbolism?

So this article is looking at the symbols of Christmas? It is looking at subliminal messages and how this effects people?

Christmas does have deep personal and cultural meanings and this is used to fuel commercialism.

syntagmatic interconnection and associative interconnection.

The interconnection of terms do put a limitation on arbitrariness but why does it matter how?

Yes, I know there is an idea and an auditory image, you've mentioned it a hundred times!

When I think "sun," I do think of other words without meaning to but they do not "restrict its sense," they do the opposite.

I feel like he's repeating himself, yes I understand that there is the signifier and the signified. I understand that they are two separate things.

What if someone just uses one word to answer a question or something, like, "Yeah." Is it still part of a system?

Outside speech and within speech.

Not sure what semiological facts in societies are either.

No other institution involves all individuals all the time and most institutions can be improved.

I guess I'm just not clear on what a social institution is and how language is one.

I'm confused is language a social institution? Is a natural institution sound? What would hand signs be? Social Institution?

Language is social product.

Isn't all sound social? Are they saying making noises is individual and language is social? Sound is accidental and language is essential?

Faculty of articulated language. Our use of organs.

Could have just said this in the beginning.

Section two: looking at languages, the language, and the language faculty and its use by the individual. I thought we weren't looking at language or languages just linguistics proper.

They want to trace history of all known languages, and laws of language, and the utility of linguistics how it is related to general culture.

Aren't there languages which still aren't written?

If it is looking at all languages in all periods then this is way too big. Languages are constantly changing and dying. How will they accomplish this?

"every kind of variety of human language." This does not seem possible.

So they want to keep the written word (signifier) separate from the spoken word? Why isn't all that matters is that we keep the signifier separate from the signified?

Why?

Languages can be separated geographically and can create bonds.

Philology, the method of critical examination of texts.

Grammar, laying down rules and distinguishing between correct language and incorrect language.

Linguistics proper has gone through three phases: Grammar, philological movement, and languages could be compared to each other.

What's the difference between linguistics proper and languages?

Have we given feminism a permanent definition yet? I'd assume so since it is taught in classes and this article was written in the seventies.

So feminism looks at historical aspect of writing.

they need a definition for feminist criticism that is their own.

Writing as outlet not just reading.

I'm glad I din't live in that time period.

Back to reflection and action combined. This really reminds me of Marxism.

This seems like it would be pretty obvious is it only mentioned as code for, some women's husbands might get in the way? I used to wonder why men would even care about women writing aside from control but now I realize that all the female characters and anything about women in their writing would be shown as completely wrong or at least inaccurate and reflect poorly on male writers if women rewrote the standards.

So by alienating women men actually helped them become more independent? I guess that makes sense.

So it's like starting from scratch?

So the problem with the feminist critique of The Mayor of Casterbridge was that it was still from a man's point of view not a woman's?

So Hardy made women the symbols of repressed men?

Howe makes it sound like all men want to sell their wives and daughters. He says it's a "fantasy," that's scary.

Woman as reader Old Testament, woman as writer New Testament.

Woman as reader is when a woman consumes male produced literature. It is also called the feminist critique. Women-as-sign in semiotic systems.

Woman as writer means the woman is the producer of textual meaning. La gynocritique.

Feminist criticism can be divided into two varieties. The woman as reader and woman as writer.

So if the theory is perfected then they will just reflect and not act?

So the first obstacle is that there is no clear definition for feminism and what they wish to achieve and the second obstacle is that theory and other literary definitions are sexist? I'm confused on the second one.

So Mellen is saying that women are not strict enough to be scholars?

"Feminist criticism is the most isolated and least understood." "The absence of a clearly articulated theory makes feminist criticism perpetually vulnerable to such attacks, and not even feminist critics seem to agree on what it is that they mean to profess and defend." Just from the little bit we went over feminism in Studies in English I saw that there were different ways people saw feminism. I hear a lot of people who think feminism is just a bunch of man-haters, I always thought it was just the idea that women and men should be equal. I guess there will always be extremists though.

I don't know the difference between Tartu and Barthian semiotics, I don't even know what they are in the first place. I also don't know what clinamen means.

Having is different from being. Having is also part of class distinctions.

I think it is funny that he thinks there is a text-book revolution.

Bureaucracy doesn't educate peasants.

Reflection without action is meaningless and useless.

The paragraph about philosophy being authentic has me confused.

praxis, happy medium between activism and subjectivism.

"Dual beings," and "internalised the oppressor," This is a much more intimate way of looking at Marxism.

What's the difference between being an oppressor and trying to give yourself a better life? Where do you draw the line?

prescriptions make the oppressed conform to the prescriber's consciousness.

Struggle between two economic classes.

suppressing reality and discovering reality.

Does this mean that the education system is meant for the few? The same families are going through school and get jobs that pay well so they can send their kids to school to get a good education. But the poor can't afford school and get lower paying jobs that can't pay for school. So both classes stay separate and never move around.

labels we talked about earlier in the semester, wife, mother, etc.

I'm confused again

So the author is not dead here?

This is just what he said before, the superstructure depends on the infrastructure right?

What is legal ideology?

Couldn't he just say the subject makes the ideology?

So isn't church an ideological apparatus? Earlier he said there was no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus

So state apparatus has repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatuses?

I'm confused.

Why didn't he just start with that?

This is reminding me of Fish

Wait, what is a society? Was that answered. Are they saying there is no answer?

Not quite sure what that means, I'll have to look it up

We need the material base then the ideology, and consciousness.

"respective indices of effectivity"

Must have infrastructure to have superstructure

"Labor power needs reproduction of skills and submission to rules of established order."

This is stating to sound like Vulgar Marxism isn't it?

Talking about how different cultures have different needs and how different specialties lead to a more diversified production.

Uses the word "production," too much. I feel like I'm reading in circles if such a thing is possible.

"Must reproduce the productive forces and the existing relations of production."

Is this the cave man metaphor? One person produces using the existing materials and another person produces using something else until the social relations create a more complex system of production?

Is production modes of production? So everything material?

What would be an example of something outside the reproductive point of view? How is it abstract?

Oh, keeping the same conditions just expanding them, got it.

I was kind of hoping the conditions of production now would be explained before we work on the new conditions.

"The Reproduction on the Conditions of Production." So we are recreating how production works.

There is social relation between artist and audience

we must understand to past literature and the struggle of men and women against exploitation.

technologism

revolutionary artist's task is to develop these new media, as well as to transform the older modes of artistic production

The author as producer

Literature is text and social activity

Reflectionist theory: reflects reality in fragmented form.

What is the difference between a naturalist and a realist?

What is proletarian art?

literature must become a cog and a screw of one single great social democratic machine. Neutrality in writing is impossible.

Conflicts in meaning and conflicts in form.

formalism is an abstract subjectivity.

Must have balance between content and form.

Art against ideology

Is he saying that an undeveloped state of society is better, at least for creating art?

Why does he keep mentioning art? What does art have to do with social classes? How is it connected to Marxism?

Concerned with unity of text, ideology, social relations, to productive forces. I'm unsure of what productive forces are.

Purpose is to understand the relations between works and ideological worlds they inhabit.

economic base=infrastructure, superstructure=law and politics which legitimate power of the social class which owns economic production and ideology.

Bit confused with consciousness doesn't determine life: life determines consciousness. Does Marxism look at social connections to text or historical?

Page 2, So Marxism focuses on the historical aspect of a text?

The sociology of literature, the means of literary production, distribution, and exchange in a particular society. So how readers react to a piece?

He wanted to form an "artistic whole." I never would have thought Karl Marx focused on the aesthetic side of literature or artistic freedom. I feel like I should research him some more.

Page 1, Didn't know Karl Marx wrote poetry or novels.

Last page. Wait, so all this was just to say, "There is no answer?" This really is the Toolbox all over again.

Need to look "solipsist," up

Again, too late.

Bottom of 317. So this is supposed to be an answer to the question "Is my interpretation as valid as your's?" He is saying it is not just a matter of individual construings but ideas within a context or different normative states where some interpretations are more available than others.

Too late.

1. So in order to understand different contexts of meaning it is important to receive new data from the outside. So it's just reading.

I feels like he is overthinking things. What I'm getting from this is you are free to think what you want but a sentence only has a certain amount of meaning based on the context.

1. Even when no context is given the reader uses the context that has been most encountered. So he is saying again that there is always context.

Bottom of 308 and beginning of 309, is he trying to be confusing?

"Meanings are the product of circumstance." Then what has he been arguing? If you don't believe there is an infinite amount of meanings to a sentence then who does, and who are you trying to convince otherwise?

"Institutional Nesting." One meaning can be more normal than another. One meaning is more available, more people agree with it.

"If a sentence existed in a state in which it is not embedded in some situation it would be normative state." But there is no sentence that is not attached to some situation so this "normative" state does not exist.

There is bringing me back to *The Theory Toolbox. there is no one way to view something, everything depends on context.

There is no infinite number of meanings, the meanings are constrained by the number of ways it could be heard.

When he says literal meanings are overridden by the actions of willful interpreters is he saying that the reader has all the power and the text doesn't matter? I thought we learned that reading was a relationship between the text and the reader.

Why would he preach that there is an "instability of the text and unavailability of determinate meanings," when he says there is no such thing?

I love the last line, reading is breaking down the barrier between the inner and outer worlds.

Cannot just look at the mind of the reader, too narrow.

Study of formal features alone isn't enough.

An author's interpretation of his/her own work may also change over time just like a reader coming back to a poem. We are different every time we read something.

I agree that a poem "comes into being" between the writer and the reader. "One to suggest, the other to make concrete." I don't believe in the concrete part but I think an author can suggest.

In section thirteen I love the comparison between text and musical scores. They must both be emotional.

The readers are using past experiences to understand the poem, one person was in a play and was using those experiences to compare to the poem.

In section twelve I love how she says there is a difference between a poem and the text. I wonder what the new critics would think about that?

Seems to talk a lot about how interpretation comes from past experiences and the link between a word and an image or emotion.

There are so many ideas about what the poem might be about. Some people think it is about a play, and then others think it could be about science or a bomb. The guesses are so varied.

I keep going back to the poem wishing I had written down my thoughts about it like the graduate students so I could compare my notes to theirs'. I think this is very interesting how it actually shows the readers' thought process as they read. It shows how the first time you read something you don't understand much but there is still a lot going on in your mind. You ask so many questions and start to organize things.

So Rosenblatt's study focused on how the readers' reached their interpretations and Richards's study focused on the end results? I think it is interesting how she made sure to use a text that none of the readers had read before and removed the name of the author in case that helped them jump to conclusions.

1) that rhythm (the vague, if direct, expression of emotion) and poetic form in general are intimately connected with and interpreted by other and more precise parts of poetic meaning, (2) that poetic meaning is inclusive or multiple and hence sophisticated.

What exactly does he mean when he says meaning is inclusive?

Maybe the origin doesn't matter so much if a piece of work can survive through many ages and still be appreciated then the culture around the work must not be that important. There is something else within the poem that other generations can appreciate without being in its original time period.

between what is immediately meant by words and what is evoked by the meaning of the words,

Only the meaning of the word is supposed to be used in criticism not the emotions evoked from them? I can understand this from a critic's point of view but it would be difficult to read without having some kind of response to any of the words, it seems like that is something uncensored that just happens as you read.

Isn't a piece of work partly judged on its emotional effect, that's one of the things that make a piece good isn't it? People usually like things that are relatable. If they aren't studying the emotional effect or the history behind a piece are they only looking at diction and grammar?

The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins.

I feel like the origins of a piece of work are important. In my art history class one of the ways a researcher learns about the importance of an artwork is by dating it and trying to find out what may have influenced its creation. It's probably just me but I feel like origins are important. What if a poem was written during the Harlem Renaissance and the poem is about a black person? Isn't the time period important to the criticism?

Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.

If a poet cannot talk about their own poem does that diminish the value of the poem? If it is detached from the author then why does it matter if they cannot talk about it?

If the work is detached from the author is it also detached from the critic or reader?

*Design and intention

These two things are interesting to me because what if a poet for example really didn't have any design in mind? What if they just wrote a poem because they felt like it and the words just came to mind? Is it possible that sometimes the critics make more of something than they should or projecting their own ideas into a piece of work?*

I feel that it is important to be able to adapt but at the same time it is important not to feel as though we are being controlled by technology. Sometimes technology should be able to adapt to peoples' lifestyles or it loses the versatility that paper has.