Literary Criticism

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Literary Criticism

• Class 3

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• Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television
• from Channels of Discourse (1996)
• by Ellen Seiter

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• I. The Sign
• (pp. 138-143)

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Saussure
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Charles S. Peirce

• 1839-1914, American philosopher
• A sign is either an icon, an index, or a symbol
  (Peirce on Signs, 239).

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icon

• Where the sign resembles its referent, e.g. a
  picture of a ship, a map, a road-sign for falling
  rocks

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index

• Where the sign is associated . . . with its
  referent
• They rely on a material connection between
  signifier and signified
• e.g. smoke as a sign of fire, clouds as a sign of
  rain, symptoms of a disease, photographs

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symbolic

• Where the sign has an arbitrary relation to its
  reference, e.g. language

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Group Activity

• Apply Peirces theory of signs to FIVE examples
  below. What kinds of signs are they?

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(1)
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(2)
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(3)
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Food for Thought

• What are some of the similarities and differences
  between Saussure and Peirce?

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• Seiter notes Semiotics reminds us that with
  nonfictional television, no less than with its
  fictional counterpart, we are dealing not with
  referents but with signs (142).
• Any examples of your own?

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• II. Denotation and Connotation (pp. 143-145)

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• Please review our discussion on Barthes in Class
  2.
• Seiter argues that One of the goals of semiotic
  analysis of television is to make us conscious of
  the use of connotation on television, so that we
  realize how much of what appears naturally
  meaningful on TV is actually historical,
  changeable, and culturally specific (144).

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• Seiters examples
• The color of light (pink for femaleness, white
  for goodness)
• Music (minor chords and slow tempos signifying
  melancholy, solo instrumentals signifying
  loneliness)
• Photographic technique (soft focus signifying
  romance, hand-held cameras signifying on-the-spot
  documentary)

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• Another example the space shuttle Challenger

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• III. Combination and Codes (pp.145-146)

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• Steiter looks at TV as a communication system and
  identifies five channels (codes?) of
  communication image, voice, music, sound effect,
  and graphics (logos, borders, frames, diagrams,
  and computer-animated materials). (146)

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• IV Structuralism
• (pp. 147-154)

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• Seiter cites Hodge and Tripps analysis of
  Fangface as an illustration of the structuralist
  approach.
• Hodge and Tripp argue that cartoonswidely
  considered on of the lowest forms of
  televisionare surprisingly complex. (147)

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Fangface
Fangs
Whenever Fangs sees the moon, a picture of the
moon, or something that resembles the moon, he
transforms into FANGFACE. He is unaware that he
is FANGFACE. Sometimes when he changes back, he
remembers something that he did as FANGFACE, but
he just dismisses it as a weird dream that he
had. He is a coward and runs whenever there's
danger.
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• Hodge and Tripp find that the nature/culture
  axis is a highly significant one in the world of
  Fangface (151).

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• One can look . . . at the larger field of
  childrens literature, animated television, and
  commercial culture and find that the
  nature/culture division, or the blurring of the
  two, is a central characteristic of childrens
  media. (151)

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• The figures of the werewolf in Fangface and
  Splinter (who is simultaneously a Japanese Ninja
  master and a rat) in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  are products of different historical moments and
  different racial ideologies. Does the use of
  binary opposition nature/culture to analyze these
  cartoons obscure important differences by being
  too universalist? (151)

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• Terry Eagleton has remarked that one of the
  primary drawbacks to structualist research is
  that it is hair-raisingly unhistorical (152).

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• A historical approach to the animated television
  series would also allow us to contextualize and
  explain the kinds of changes that can be observed
  in different series from the 1970s to the 1990s .
  . . (152).

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• For if signs are conventional, they are also
  changeable. But semiotics remains silent on the
  question of how to change a sign system.
  Stubbornly restricting itself to the text, it
  cannot explain television economics, production,
  history, or the audience (153).

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• In conclusion, Seiter suggests that we think of
  semiotics and structuralism as a kind of useful
  exercise for making sure that we know our object
  before venturing out into other models of study
  such as questions regarding audience activity
  and the play of television as discourse (153).

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• The End