This week's blog post, like this week's lecture, is co-presented by Chaya and Alan.
The overture to this week's lecture was Laurie Anderson's riff on William S. Burroughs' phrase "Language is a virus from outer space." Both Anderson and Burroughs describe language as an alien thing upon which we nevertheless depend to effectively act in our world. Critical discourse analysts also see language as a form of social practice, that is, a mode of action that has real consequences. As van Dijk and Fairclough discuss in this week's readings, the goal of critical discourse analysis is to expose the discursive strategies that reify and reproduce inequalities.
I chose to discuss the character of Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to demonstrate the power of discourse to constitute systems of knowledge, identity, and social relations, but other examples in pop culture abound. For instance, the new political drama "House of Cards" features a particularly manipulative congressman who shamelessly abuses the capacity of language to generate realities. In the second episode, he advises an eager journalist to broadcast the name of a candidate who is running for office. The exact quote is worth repeating: "You're going to say a name over and over, and then watch it come out of the President's Mouth. This is where we get to create."
Chaya's slides can be downloaded from the usual place on Blackboard (in PowerPoint).
Alan's part of the lecture dealt briefly with content analysis, but went beyond to discuss interpretation as a practice in the humanities, not just the social sciences. Slides here:
The first image is from the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. An impressively thorough analysis of paintings in this and other Bond films may be found here: thebondbulletin.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-paintings-in-skyfall-and-their.html. I also mentioned the Bechdel Test as an example of a very basic quantitative interpretive method. There's already been at least one great post about this on the course blogs, and you can find an example of a popular application of this method here: http://bechdeltest.com/ . Try applying it to the next film or tv episode you watch, and let's see what informal results we get in the next class. The Bond canon probably doesn't hold up too well against the Bechdel Test -- maybe Goldfinger? -- but what's more important is that the test's value derives from the best tradition of quantitative methods: it prompts us to notice the things that might otherwise escape our attention, especially phenomena that try to fly under our cognitive, social, and ideological radar. Some of the most important insights in feminist research have come from simply running the numbers in relation to gender, especially salaries. Quantitative approaches to interpretation may be a blunt instrument, in the sense that they tend to deal poorly with context, nuance, and ambiguity, but sometimes a blunt instrument is the right tool for the job -- especially if there are barriers in the way.
Regarding the peril and promise of quantification in interpretation, I also mentioned The Guardian's questionable application of the Flesch-Kincaid reading-level test to State of the Union addresses. See The Economist's critique (containing links to other critiques) makes some good points about the too-easy reduction of texts to data, as well as the social value that is sometimes uncritically bestowed on certain methods. A more thoughtful application of text analysis to State of the Union addresses may be found here: bellm.org/blog/2013/02/10/tracing-the-changing-state-of-the-union-with-text-analysis/; and especially here: stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/ . In the latter case, I recommend reading the essay that accompanies the analysis. It's biased, unobjective, and selective in its evidence, but also makes no claims to be otherwise (hence the author's deliberate use of the term essay), and thereby avoids The Guardian's mistake of assuming that data speaks for itself. I also recommend using the text-zoom feature on your browser -- probably ctrl- or command- plus or minus -- to block out the site's bright red background, or just wear sunglasses...
Finally, if this lecture somehow prompts you to watch the original Night of the Living Dead, and perhaps to subject it to the Bechdel Test, ask yourself this: why do the characters, and the film itself, seem to forget that the house has an upper storey?
The overture to this week's lecture was Laurie Anderson's riff on William S. Burroughs' phrase "Language is a virus from outer space." Both Anderson and Burroughs describe language as an alien thing upon which we nevertheless depend to effectively act in our world. Critical discourse analysts also see language as a form of social practice, that is, a mode of action that has real consequences. As van Dijk and Fairclough discuss in this week's readings, the goal of critical discourse analysis is to expose the discursive strategies that reify and reproduce inequalities.
I chose to discuss the character of Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to demonstrate the power of discourse to constitute systems of knowledge, identity, and social relations, but other examples in pop culture abound. For instance, the new political drama "House of Cards" features a particularly manipulative congressman who shamelessly abuses the capacity of language to generate realities. In the second episode, he advises an eager journalist to broadcast the name of a candidate who is running for office. The exact quote is worth repeating: "You're going to say a name over and over, and then watch it come out of the President's Mouth. This is where we get to create."
Chaya's slides can be downloaded from the usual place on Blackboard (in PowerPoint).
Alan's part of the lecture dealt briefly with content analysis, but went beyond to discuss interpretation as a practice in the humanities, not just the social sciences. Slides here:
The first image is from the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. An impressively thorough analysis of paintings in this and other Bond films may be found here: thebondbulletin.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-paintings-in-skyfall-and-their.html. I also mentioned the Bechdel Test as an example of a very basic quantitative interpretive method. There's already been at least one great post about this on the course blogs, and you can find an example of a popular application of this method here: http://bechdeltest.com/ . Try applying it to the next film or tv episode you watch, and let's see what informal results we get in the next class. The Bond canon probably doesn't hold up too well against the Bechdel Test -- maybe Goldfinger? -- but what's more important is that the test's value derives from the best tradition of quantitative methods: it prompts us to notice the things that might otherwise escape our attention, especially phenomena that try to fly under our cognitive, social, and ideological radar. Some of the most important insights in feminist research have come from simply running the numbers in relation to gender, especially salaries. Quantitative approaches to interpretation may be a blunt instrument, in the sense that they tend to deal poorly with context, nuance, and ambiguity, but sometimes a blunt instrument is the right tool for the job -- especially if there are barriers in the way.
Regarding the peril and promise of quantification in interpretation, I also mentioned The Guardian's questionable application of the Flesch-Kincaid reading-level test to State of the Union addresses. See The Economist's critique (containing links to other critiques) makes some good points about the too-easy reduction of texts to data, as well as the social value that is sometimes uncritically bestowed on certain methods. A more thoughtful application of text analysis to State of the Union addresses may be found here: bellm.org/blog/2013/02/10/tracing-the-changing-state-of-the-union-with-text-analysis/; and especially here: stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/ . In the latter case, I recommend reading the essay that accompanies the analysis. It's biased, unobjective, and selective in its evidence, but also makes no claims to be otherwise (hence the author's deliberate use of the term essay), and thereby avoids The Guardian's mistake of assuming that data speaks for itself. I also recommend using the text-zoom feature on your browser -- probably ctrl- or command- plus or minus -- to block out the site's bright red background, or just wear sunglasses...
Finally, if this lecture somehow prompts you to watch the original Night of the Living Dead, and perhaps to subject it to the Bechdel Test, ask yourself this: why do the characters, and the film itself, seem to forget that the house has an upper storey?
