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RG Hermeneutics
Reading Guide #3
OG – Part 1, Chapter 23 – “Hermeneutics, reception aesthetics, and film interpretation” by Noel King, pp.
212-221
1.
Right off the bat, the author addresses a dilemma in film criticism about how to understand the
act of watching movies. What are the two positions?
2.
Can you explain what are the issues in the double question that the author connects to
hermeneutics and reception aesthetics?
3.
What is hermeneutics?
4.
Do viewers need to arrive at an appropriate reading of a film?
5.
Can a viewer misread a movie?
6.
Is the reading of a film within certain limits?
7.
Can viewers do whatever they want with the film text?
8.
What is Umberto Eco’s response to the “neo-pragmatists”? What does he mean by
intentions
?
9.
Note: Eco is an Italian semiotician, and author of
The Name of the Rose
and other fictional and
theoretical books. Semiotics studies signs. One branch of semiotics explains that signs have two
components. Signs are the inseparable connection between the signified (i.e. the animal or idea of
the animal that barks) and the signifier (i.e. the sound of the word “dog”). Some examples of
semiotics schools are those represented by Ferdinand de Saussure (signifier and signified),
Roland Barthes (building up from Saussure, denotation, connotation, metatext), and Charles S.
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- Spring '08
- Stallworth
- Semiotics, Davide Bordwell, historical poetics, RG Hermeneutics Reading
-
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