Cultural Analysis and Semiotics
Assignment: Many of the practices and actions that constitute our daily lives are complexly structured signifying practices that create meaning and communicate ideas in a similar manner to the various practices of the fine and popular arts. For this assignment, choose either a contemporary image or an instance in your own life in which identity was negotiated in a complex manner through the codes of dress and fashion. Analyze the manner in which this process unfolds using the terms and concepts of semiotics. More specifically, carry out the following tasks:
Choose an instance in your own life or an image of a person in which that individual’s identity is carefully negotiated and constructed through dress and fashion. It is important that you choose your example carefully to allow you to write a sufficiently complex analysis of this process. Please copy the image into the body of your text before uploading it to Turnitin. If for some reason you cannot get a digital copy of the image or take a photo of the image if its from the print media, please try to turn in a copy of the image to me in person.
Perform a semiotic analysis of your chosen example utilizing at least eight of the key terms from part two of the course. Note that you may use other derivations of key terms, for example “encoded” rather than “encoding”. Also note: you only need to provide definitions (in footnotes or glossary) for the eight key terms that you employ.
How would you describe this individual’s identity or your own projected identity (depending on your chosen example) as it is expressed through sartorial (dress) codes.
meetings: February 18 (Monday class schedule) and 19; February 17 – President’s Day (University Closed)
read: Paul Staiti, “Character and Class: The Portraits of John Singleton Copley”
read: excerpts from Murrell, Spencer, and McFarlane, eds. Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader
You should read the introduction to this book. There are also a few other chapters reproduced, which you may read optionally.
outcomes
At the conclusion of Part II, students will have a knowledge of the basic tenets and vocabulary of semiotics and demonstrate the ability to subject all aspects of culture to a textual reading in which individual signs are analyzed in terms of how they communicate meaning within a complexly structured cultural code.
keywords
semiotics
sign
signifying practice
signifier
signified
referent
index
icon
symbol
denotation
conotation
encoding
decoding
iconography
iconology
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