1 University of Guelph Department of Sociology and Anthropology Fall 2016 Lecturer: Dr. Victoria I. Burke Course Time: 19:00-21:50 PM TUE Course Location: ROZH 108 Office Location: Mack 607 (office wing) Office Hours: 4:00-5:00 PM TUE Email: [email protected] Semiotics: Theory and Methodology
2 Semiotics is the study of linguistic signs, sign systems, codes of signification, and the ways in which signs generate meaning. It examines the production and circulation of meaning and symbolic systems in society. This advanced course in semiotics will study the history of the conception of the sign, from G.W.F. Hegel (nineteenth century), Saussure, Peirce, Benveniste to Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida (twentieth century). We will look at idealist, structuralist, and post-structuralist theories of signification, and specific sign systems and topographies, such as psychoanalysis, surrealism, theories of desire in language, theories of language and the unconscious, as well as the signification of gender. This course on semiotics will be focused on the theoretical study of language from a European, rather than Anglo-American, point of view. This is a sociology course, and our interpretive work will not only examine the tools and categories developed and used by various semioticians but, also, the sociosemiotics of cultural phenomena, popular culture, and material symbolic codes, especially as they are illustrated in Roland Barthes'sMythologies. "A tree is a tree," writes Barthes, "but a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of socialusagewhich is added to pure matter”. Women's magazine food- photography, the iconography of the baseball hero Babe Ruth, the "becoming- bare" in commercial striptease, and the spectacle of defeat in wrestling all reflect concrete systems and representational codes of meaning that influence our experience of the social world. Our experience of the social world is saturated with such symbolic codes. Social patterns, boundaries, and expectations are linked to codes of meaning by the semiotic structures of analogy, similitude and difference, reference. Our analysis of particular, material codes in the social imaginary will not only illuminate these concrete systems of meaning but, also, the various theories of language that we will study and apply. These theorists all conceived of subjectivity and, therefore, linguistic meaning, differently. Jacques Lacan wrote that “the unconscious is structured like a language”. Semiotic codes are reflected in the concrete form of popular culture, canonized literary characters, cultural heroes, and artistic representation, symbol and allegory, and social boundaries. Much of our attention will be devoted to analyzing the semiotic structures of specific cultural codes through application of theory. Our study of psychoanalysis will examine mappings of psychic, symbolic imaginaries (such as abjection, the third, the phallus, sublimation, avoidance, and neuroses). Our study will intersect with other standard philosophical matters, such the mind, the nature
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