Midterm Flashcards
What is semiotics?
- Studies the way “signs” communicate and the rules that govern their use.
- Study of everything that can be used for communication
What is Ferdinand De Sassure’s Semiology?
Concept of sign (smallest unit of meaning)
What is a sign
signifier + signified
What is a signifier?
Image, object, sound. Has a material form that triggers a mental concept
What is an example of a signifier?
The journal itself in fateful findings
What is signified?
The meaning the signifier represents
What is an example of signified?
The journal signifies nostalgia and connection in fateful findings.
What is denotation?
It is the 1st order of significance and direct meaning
What is connotation?
It is the 2nd order of significance and the implied meaning?
What is syntagm?
The order or arrangement of signs
What is an example of syntagm in the little mermaid?
In the part of your world scene, arial’s actions, expressions, and exploration of human actions is the syntagm. All of these combined create a meaningful scene that expresses Arial’s longing to be a part of the human world.
What is an example of denotation and connotation?
Denotation of a rose: the rose itself
Connotation of the rose: romance, love
What is the Oedipus Complex?
Developed by Freud. At ages 3-6, children develop attraction towards opposite-sex parents and experience rivalry/jealousy with same-sex parents. Boys face castration anxiety as as result of realization that women do not have a penis. Boys fear the loss of their penis as a punishment for their attraction to their mother and murderous fantasies towards their dad. Girls have competition with mom for her father as a result of penis envy.
What is the paradigm in relation to film?
All the possible actions, words, and expressions a character could use in a situation or plot
What does paradigm mean?
A group of signs so similar that they might be substituted for one another in a syntagm.
What is psychoanalysis?
Describes ways in which the small human being comes to develop a specific sexual identity and personality
What is the unconscious?
Freud believed individuals have unconscious desires, many of which are repressed
What is bourgeois feminism.
Women’s concern to get equal rights within a capitalist society (equal pay)
What are qualities of slasher films?
- Killer cannot have sex so he kills out of frustration
- Killer is permanently locked in childhood/childhood trauma.
- There is a terrible place that holds victims in
- No guns are used as weapons. Close, personal, and intimate objects are used.
What is bourgeois feminism also known as?
Liberal feminism
What is marxist feminism?
Focuses on linking of specific female oppressions to larger structure of capitalism and to oppression of other groups (gays, minorities).
What do marxist feminists criticize?
Libearal/bourgeois feminism
What is radical feminism?
- Designation of woman as different than men.
- Desire to establish separate female communities to forward specific women’s needs
- Want nothing to do with men
- Femininity is seen as better
What is post-structuralist feminism?
Idea we need to analyze the language order through which we learn to be what our culture calls “women” —distinct from a group called “men”—as we attempt to bring change beneficial to women
First you need to analyze why the hell certain things are associated with women and same for men then you can bring the change
