Analysing images


Using what I have learned in class, I wold  like to analyse the following image:


In this image I can see that its shown the contrast between to lifestyles completely different in what it is opportunities and health. I also see the spirit of helping the ones who need it, the ones that are suffering because of famine. The idea of this image as I see it is to call the attention of people in order to get more help for the african people. We see in the image a very big and healthy hand , that shows the opportunities and abundance in the life of the occidental people, while the other unhealthy and small hand shows the horrible lifestyle of the people from Africa. 

Aplying your analysis: "the big sleep"


The big sleep is a nobel from Raymond Chandler, writen in years 30. The following link will take you to my analysis of a piece from this book, using voice thread.


http://voicethread.com/share/2992610/

Practical criticism: "You fit into me"


Today I will develop an analysis of a poem called "you fit into me" by the canadian writer Margaret Atwood, following questions based on the new criticism movement.


You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye.


1-What is the relationship between the tittle and the rest of the poem?
Under my point of view, the only relation between this two is that the tittle tells us that someone fits into another, while in the rest of the poem it will be explained how and the real meaning about "fitting into another".


2-What words, if any, need to be defined?
hook-and-eye:  A clothes fastener consisting of a small blunt metal hook that is inserted in a corresponding loop or eyelet.


3-What relations do you see among any words in the poem?
There is a relation  between eye and hook because first it is presented as a clothing system, but then it will change to a fishing hook, and a real eye, in order to change our idea of what we think it is being told.


4-What are the various connotative meaning of the words in the poem? Do you see various shades of meaning help establish relationships or patterns in the text?
The author plays with the meaning of the words eye and hook, in order to, as I said before, change the whole meaning or idea that is being told. First we read that they fit like a hook-and-eye, so we think that they are made for each other, but then it changes to a real hook and a human eye, and this both fitting together means pain and suffering.


5-What symbols, images or figures of speech are used? What is the relationship between them?

The whole poem is an irony because it changes the meaning in the to last verses by changing the way of using the words hook and eye. By this, the author is telling us that love is not just happiness, it is also pain.

6.- What elements of rhyme, meter or pattern can you discuss?

It is a free verse poem. It means that it doesn't have any rhyme and the amount of syllables in each verse are diferent.

7.- What is the tone of the poem?
Pain and disappointment

8.- From what point of view is the content of the poem being told?

From a person that had a love relation with somebody, but this ended on a very painful situation for him.

9.- What tensions, ambiguities or paradoxes arise within the poem?

There is an ambiguity in the fact that the poem says :" you fit me like a hook and eye".

We can think that it means the clothing system, but the true meaning is that it is about a fishing hook fitting into a human eye.

10.- What do you believe the chief paradox or irony is in the text?

To show the disappointment that the person had on love and how painful this was to him.

11.- How do all of the elements of the poem support and develop the primary paradox or irony?

This are there in order to develop the best the main idea and the feelings shown in the poem. I also believe that the hook-and-eye ambiguity helps to explain the person's point of view on love and his experience.

Literature studies through time


Greeks:  for early critics, literature was concern with human behavior and its relationship with       the  physical world, society and ethics. 


Romanticism: a belief that higher orders of human truth were possible thorugh trascending base concerns of pure reason, politics and worldy values. 


Scientific Determinism: is the belief that the world-objects, actions, and forces-arises from  clear causes that can be revealed through objective scientific inquiry.


New Criticism: has a focus on close reading with little to no concern for history, ideology, politics, biography, or other factors outside the text. 


Reader-response criticism: moves the emphasis of textual analysis from a singular focus on the text to one where the reader works in concert with a text to produce an interpretation.


Strucruralism: (Saussure's work)  Words were SIGNS made up of two component parts: a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED.


Poststructuralism: Negotiating not what a sign is, but what a sign is not.We know through difference.


Marxism: All texts contain subtexts which are extensions of historical and ideological conflict, the same conflicts being played out in real societies and not just in literary texts. 


Feminism: Devoted to describing and interpreting (or reinterpreting) women's experience through literature. 


Cultural poetics: History as the body of knowledge. Cultural poetics seesks to investigate these multiple discourses (history, law, economics, politcs, and even literary analysis itself) in order to explore the connections between all human activities and their role in making life meaningful. 


Postcolonial: It is definied as an approach to texts produced in colonized countries.It derives from multiple critical approaches, through topics such as nationalism, ethnicity, language, history and how these issues are dealt with when two (or more) cultures clash, usually with one dominant and one deemed inferior (cultural imperialism). 

What is literature?

Here are three meanings of what is literature, from different sources:

Merrian-Webster Online Dictionary: Writings in prose or verse; especially: writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas for permanent or universal interest.


The Free Dictionary (Online): Written material such as poetry, novels, essays, etc., especially works of imagination characterized by excellence of style and expression and by themes of general enduring interest.


L&L Course Companion p.9: A highly developed use of language in that is the stylized manipulation of language for larger effect (purpose) and/or affect (emotional response)

The quest to discover a definition for “literature” is a road that is much travelled, though the point of arrival, if ever reached, is seldom satisfactory. Most attempted definitions are broad and vague, and they inevitably change over time. Generally, most people have their own ideas of what literature is. When enrolling in a literary course at university, you expect that everything on the reading list will be “literature”. Similarly, you might expect everything by a known author to be literature, even though the quality of that author's work may vary from publication to publication. Perhaps you get an idea just from looking at the cover design on a book whether it is “literary” or “pulp”. Literature then, is a form of demarcation, however fuzzy, based on the premise that all texts are not created equal. Some have or are given more value than others.


Etymologically, literature has to do with letters, the written as opposed to the spoken word, though not everything that is written down is literature. As a classification, it doesn't really have any firm boundary lines. The poet Shelley wanted to include some legislative statutes of parliaments under poetry because they created order and harmony out of disorder. There is recurring agreement amongst theorists though that for a work to be called literature must display excellence in form and style.

The following video shows why is it literature important.

What comes fist? : thought or language


What can we say comes first: language or thoyght. Through time, many scientists and researchers from the topic have been interested in this question, and they have formulated what they thought was the right answer. The followin statements are from a few of this scientists.


 "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. "These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first.

Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean.

As Lev Vygotsky states, “the structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought. It cannot therefore be placed on thought like clothes off a rack. Speech does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought. Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed but completed in the word. Therefore, precisely because of the contrasting directions of the movement, the development of the internal and external aspects of speech form a true unity.” The picture that Vygotsky is painting here is that of language combining with conscious activity to form a unity. There is no casual relation to be explained between the thought had and the word formed; rather, meaningful expressions are a result of conscious processes operating upon a linguistic medium. The two are conceptually dependent, and idea that is vigorously argued for in Wittegnstein’s famous “private language argument” and given similar expression by Vygotsky’s account of language acquisition in childhood.

 

Saussure draws a distinction between language (langue) and the activity of speaking (parole). Speaking is an activity of the individual; language is the social manifestation of speech. Language is a system of signs that evolves from the activity of speech.
Language is a link between thought and sound, and is a means for thought to be expressed as sound. Thoughts have to become ordered, and sounds have to be articulated, for language to occur. Saussure says that language is really a borderland between thought and sound, where thought and sound combine to provide communication.
Spoken language includes the communication of concepts by means of sound-images from the speaker to the listener. Language is a product of the speaker’s communication of signs to the listener. Saussure says that a linguistic sign is a combination of a concept and a sound-image. The concept is what is signified, and the sound-image is the signifier. The combination of the signifier and the signified is arbitrary; i.e., any sound-image can conceivably be used to signify a particular concept.
A sign can be altered by a change in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. According to Saussure, changes in linguistic signs originate in changes in the social activity of speech.

Theorys about language.

Reflect on the following statements about language:

- "Language surrounds us every day and we know how to recognise it" (Language A: Course Companion)

- "A word is one or more sounds that in combination have a specific meaning assigned by the language"
(http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_2.htm)

- "The most powerful tool known is the one we use to build every other tool"
(http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/blog/what_language)

Reflection:

1- I think that language does sorrounds us every day because every day we talk to somebody, we read something, we maybe talk through the computer, and we know that it is language because it is something that comunicates between each other and something that we have learned through our lives.

2- As we have seen in class, language is a system of sounds with wich we make sence. Words are no more than that: we produce sounds in a specific order and tone and we create words. That is what alows us to say throuh sounds what we think.

3-Through language we can organize as a group because of comunication. If we can comunicate something to others, then we are able to do great things.

Culture/Stereotypes

Culture


Culture, by the merrian-webster dictionary is defined as the following:


 the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time <popular culture><southern culture>


 (for more descriptions visit : http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture )


So culture is ,in my point of view and based on the meanig from the web-page, a group of people that shares the same costumes or religion, for example, the middle-east cultures. This group of people is going to be comonly from the same place.


The following video shows diferent points of view about what is culture:

Class Debate:


Language is something learned vs Humans are born with the ability to create language.


Reflection:


Based on what I saw from my partner's debates and mine, I think that the trouth origin of language is a "combination" of both of them. I think that language is something that we must learn, we can't start talking since we born, because we don't know know how to do this. We must learn words and how to put this ones in order to form sentences, etc. But, why can we learn how to talk and chimps can't? This is because we are born with a special quality, that defines us as humans, that alows us to talk (even if we learn how). If you take a baby chimp and you start giving him language lessons, I am sure he will not learn how to speak, he may comunicate by gestures, but he will not speak because chimps or any other animal don't have this ability that human does have that allows you to develop language.