Communication masterclass: A field-guide to signs
This event has already taken place.
The College of Arts invites honours and postgraduate students in media, communication, literary and cultural study areas to this Communication Masterclass.
The master-class is a focused session on analysing the signs and symbols of communication. This is a free, supplementary class, and will stimulate, enrich, encourage and focus your research skills.
A field-guide to signs
This seminar will provide an introduction to, and on overview of, the evolution of the study of signs and sign-systems. It will outline the pioneering work of Saussure and examine how his ideas about signs, language and representation were taken up and developed in the related fields of semiotics and structuralism, and then subsequently critiqued and revised by post-structuralist thinkers.
Along the way relevant examples will also be discussed, demonstrating how these theories concerning signs, structures and systems can be, and have, been applied in various cultural domains, with a particular emphasis on their use in textual analysis.
Recommended pre-reading
Roland Barthes, section 2 ‘Signifier and Signified’ [pp.36-53] in The Elements of Semiology. (A PDF of this article will be provided by email once you have RSVP'd.)
Also worth reading/consulting:
Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’ (final essay in Barthes Mythologies).
David Chandler has uploaded the entire contents of his book ’Semiotics for beginners’ [AKA ‘Semiotics: The Basics’].
About the speaker
Dr Graham Jones lectures in Film, Literature and Creative Writing at Federation University. HE has taught widely in the fields of media studies, critical theory, visual aesthetics, gender studies and philosophy. He is the co-editor of Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage and his most recent book is Lyotard Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts. His work on the poststructuralist philosophers Lyotard and Deleuze focusses on two sets of relationships: that between image and text, and that between time and memory.
Registration
RSVP your attendance to [email protected] by 30 May.
When?
This event has already taken place.
