Semiotic Analysis
Documentaries
Terms
Important Thinkers
Terms II
100
In semiotic analysis, this term describes what we see, what we read, or what we hear.


What is a "signifier"?
100
This video explores the trope of the Damsel in Distress, a plot device in which a female character is placed in a perilous situation from which she cannot escape on her own and must then be rescued by a male character, usually providing a core incentive or motivation for the protagonist’s quest.
What is Anita Sarkeesian’s “Damsels in Distress”?
100
This academic discipline calls attention to the contact zones between cultures and seeks to understand them. It provides the intellectual framework in which to understand the various cultural, social, political, and economic responses to colonization.
What is postcolonialism?
100
This Swiss linguist developed the semiotic method, which is a way of coming to terms with the meaning of signs in our world.
Who is Ferdinand de Saussure?
100
This is fundamentally a construct – it is a series of ideas and beliefs, many of which go unscrutinized, about what it means to be a man in contemporary society.
 It is also performative, meaning that boys and men perform these ideas, like actors on a stage.
What is masculinity?
200
The first step in semiotic analysis is to determine this, which is the most immediate meaning associated with a sign.
What is the denotation?
200
This documentary argues that "masculinity - traditional masculinity, in particular - needs to be looked at critically and in new ways. The idea that manhood or masculinity represents a fixed, inevitable, natural state of being is a myth. What a culture embraces as 'masculine' can be better understood as an ideal or a standard - a projection, a pose, or a guise that boys and men often adopt to shield their vulnerability and adapt to the local values and expectations of their immediate and more abstract social environments."
What is Jackson Katz's Tough Guise?
200
This term describes a state of in-betweenness. It can be a site of transition or a place of waiting. Coined by Arnold van Gennep in his 1908 study Rite of Passage, this term helps us come to terms with the relationship between the virtual and the “real.”
What is liminality?
200
Reflecting on the way in which the constant forces of surveillance affect us, this french philosopher declared that "visibility is the trap."
Who is Michel Foucault?
200
This phrase describes the way in which shopping malls deliberately make bathrooms, escalators, and exits difficult to find, all in hopes that we’ll get distracted from our original intentions. Labyrinthine in design, they disorient us to ensure that we gain maximum exposure to their various “storefronts.” Even though he criticized this technique, Victor Gruen, who pioneered mall design in the United States, nevertheless gave it a name.
What is the Gruen Effect?
300
In semiotic analysis, this term describes the picture we form in our heads when we encounter a signifier. It is all the associations we make.
What is the "signified"?
300
The Viennese architect Victor Gruen is considered the father of the shopping mall. Along with his wife and partner Elsie Krummeck, he developed the concept of a “shopping town,” a social utopia designed to mimic vibrant European city centers, complete with schools, parks, hospitals, and other social amenities. But profit-hungry developers stripped away the social amenities and the rest is (sub)urban legend. This documentary looks at the architect’s life and work and his struggle with the rapidly growing consumer culture that contradicted his personal approach to public spaces.
What is The Gruen Effect: Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall?
300
Loosely defined, this term describes an intepretative technique that constructs meaning out of whatever happens to be available. While these “materials” can be drawn from just about anywhere, popular culture (and popular film, in particular) often serves as an accessible site from which to gather signs that can then be re-shaped into something new.
What is bricolage?
300
This Victorian intellectual defined culture as the best that has been thought and said in the world, all of which exists to make reason and the will of God prevail.
Who is Matthew Arnold?
300
While notoriously difficult to define, this kind of culture can nevertheless be conceived of in terms of consumption and production. Its critics are especially concerned with the relationship between culture and power, and how this relationship manifests itself in the world around us.
What is popular culture?
400
The second step in semiotic analysis is to consider the ________ of a sign, which is its social, political, or cultural meaning.
What is connotation (or connotations)?
400
This documentary takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes – images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality.
What is Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly 4?
400
In 1949, the American writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell published his seminal text, A Hero with a Thousand Faces. Working from Jungian archetypes, Campbell outlines his belief that every culture around the world has one storyline in common. In this particular kind of myth, "a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
What is the monomyth?
400
His theories about society, economics, and politics – collectively known as Marxism – hold that the history of humankind is fundamentally the history of a struggle between social classes.
Who is Karl Marx?
400
Reminiscent of nineteenth-century western expansionism, this imagined territory is still associated with spiritual renewal and economic possibility in the American mindset.
What is the American frontier?
500
This term describes signs that have several meanings at once.
What is overdetermined?
500
This documentary suggests that corporations are rapidly displacing governments as the real source of power in the world. It also suggests that if corporations were people, their behaviour could only be described as psychophrenic.
What is the Corporation?
500
According to Susan Sontag, this term describes things that are deadly serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the deadly serious, or some varied combination of the two. Philip Core has argued that it is “the lie that tells the truth.”
What is camp?
500
This French poet and philosopher once predicted that all of our social relations would eventually be commodified, by which he meant that the very relationships that define us and that we most value would eventually be used for profit. Facebook is, in some ways, the fulfillment of his prophecy.
Who is Guy Dubord?
500
This term means, quite literally, breaking the law. It has its origins in early American Protestant culture, where many believed that faith alone led to salvation. When we talk about characters like Jack Bauer, who possess a distinctly American sense of exceptionalism, we're describing this type of figure.
What is Antinomianism? (Or the Antinomian figure).
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