Thoughts on Denotation and Connotation

The difficulty with denotation is that it is built on the assumption that there is a shared meaning or interpretation between individuals.  We all know what the word "car" means but I'm sure the mental image everyone reading that word had will be different.  So even after we've agreed on a definition, how we interpret that word, what we think of, will differ.  This is what Finnegan means when she talks about the "fiction of denotation" (119), the idea that there can be an agreed upon meaning for an image or text.

Denotation is even harder now because you can't assume that people are going to share similar experiences or exposure to particular texts.  McGee laments this change from a discourse of "totalizations," in which "all discourse within a particular language community was produced from the same resources" (284), to a more heterogeneous discourse, in which "there is no longer a homogeneous body of knowledge that constitutes the common education of everyone" (286).  Today you can no longer say "The Gettysburg Address," or "the Constitution" in the case of the Tea Party, and just assume that everyone is going to know what you are talking about.

While McGee laments this transition from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous discourse, I believe that it is a positive change that gives voice to a wider range of people, but it does make the job of the critic more difficult.  Because the critic can no longer assume that his/her audience shares knowledge of or an interpretation of a text, the critic must now make more use of description in his/her analysis.  This is why Ehrenhaus employs an extended description of Mellish's death in Saving Private Ryan; he cannot assume that his audience has even seen the film or that they would have interpreted the scene in the same way.  Pointing out the SS badge on the Nazi soldier's collar as evidence of his reading of the film as basing the moral justification for the war in the Holocaust is connotative; many other people could see the same scene and not read it in that way.  The description is essential to his argument because just saying "the scene of Mellish's death at the hands of an SS soldier illustrates my point about the Holocaust as justification for the war" would have assumed that the reader of the essay would have seen the film, would have remembered that scene in sufficient detail and/or would have interpreted the scene in the same way.  The level of description allows the reader to decide if he/she agrees with Ehrenhaus' argument.

Works Cited
Ehrenhaus, Peter. "Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan." Critical Studies in Media Communication 18.3 (2001): 321-337.

Finnegan, Cara A. "What is This a Picture of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.1 (2006): 116-123.

McGee, Michael C. "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture." Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 275-289.

Fannie Lou Hamer's Testimony Before the DNC Credentials Committee

Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to the Credentials Committee of the DNC on August 22, 1964 in order to secure speaking rights at the convention for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  Hamer makes two main arguments in her speech: (1) registering to vote is a sign of being a first-class citizen in America and (2) those in power, White Americans, use force to restrict Black Americans right to be first-class citizens.  She makes use of extended personal examples, being forced off the land she worked as a sharecropper and being arrested and beaten by police after attending a voter registration workshop, to demonstrate the extremes White Americans would go to in order to prevent Black Americans from being first-class citizens.  She also makes reference to other examples of violence against Blacks, two girls being shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, the murder of Medgar Evers, etc., to demonstrate that this is not just her personal hardship but the reality of life for Black Americans in the South.  All of these examples work to show how the voices of Black Americans have been silenced by force and connects this direct and violent use of force to the DNC not giving Black voters a voice at the convention.  "All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America."

Crossdressing Cinema

My final project for this course will be part of my larger dissertation project.  For this project, I am examining the representation of transgender people in film.  This project will consist of not only close textual analysis of relevant films but also an examination of film as part of the larger discourse that shapes how transgender individuals are perceived by society.

Since this project is too large to complete in one seminar, I will be focusing on the way transgender people are presented as farce.  Presenting transgender identity and performance as an object of ridicule or as a less than serious decision is one of the many ways transgender identity is deligitimized in film.  Representative films include Some Like it Hot, Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire.

Purpose of this Blog

The purpose of this blog is to allow me a space to try out and work through the concepts we will be exploring in this course and how they apply to my research interests.  I want to develop my own take on and understanding of, my "frame," the rhetorical criticism concepts in this course, moving beyond just a basic knowledge of the concepts to a more in depth understanding of how these concepts will be useful in my research in film and visual media.  The title of this blog also refers to my research interests, the "frame" of film and visual media.