MDSA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Slasher Film, Linkedin, Intertextuality
Critical Media Studies: An Introduction (2nd edition)
Study Guide (Chapter 12)
12. Erotic Analysis
Theories of Pleasure: An Overview- Erotic = Pleasure, desire, excitement
Media Erotics explores the array of resistive pleasures that audiences derive from media by
examining the various sensuous, creative and transgressive ways in which persons use and
interpret media.
Types of Pleasure
Plaisir (consumptive)- describes a comfortable and comforting pleasure that emerges from a
passive interaction with the text. A hegemonic pleasure; a comfortable and comforting pleasure that
reproduces dominant culture/subjectivity. Dominant (hegemonic): the gaze; form, genre and narrative
Jouissance (productive)- which is often translated into English “as bliss, ecstasy, or orgasm – is
an ecstatic and disruptive pleasure that emerges from an active engagement with the text. A radically
disruptive pleasure; an elusive and ecstatic pleasure that destabilizes culture/subjectivity. Creates
crack in dominant ideology.
Transgressive Texts
Writerly (Open) Texts- is more unfinished and unsettled and, thus, invites the audience to co-
create its meaning.
Intertextuality- concerns the ways that texts gesture or refer to other texts. The ways that
texts gesture or refer to other texts; three common types of intertextuality include parodic
allusion, creative appropriation and self-reflexive reference.
Parodic Allusion- describes a type of intertextuality in which the primary text
incorporates a caricature or parody of another text.
Creative appropriation- refers to a stylistic device in which the primary text
incorporates an actual portion or segment of another text.
Self-reflexive reference- reflects an intertextual strategy in which the primary text
gestures to external discourses or events in a manner that demonstrates a self-
awareness of its own cultural status or production history.
Polyphony- which refers to the “many voicedness” of a text, was coined by the Russian
literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to explain the dialogic quality of some novels such as those of
Dostoevsky.
Dialogic Text- is one that stages an unending conversation between Self and Other
and, thus, is perpetually open and unfinished.
Carnivalesque Texts- a type of text that is well suited to an erotic mode of audience-text
interaction.
Grotesque Realism- an aesthetic of degradation or debasement, “lowering of all that is high,
spiritual, ideal and abstract.” An aesthetic of degradation or debasement that emphasizes the
lower bodily stratum.
Grotesque body- is a leaky body; it concerns openings and orifices, celebrating that which
is socially taboo. Images privilege a particular type of body: one that is unruly and
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Document Summary
Theories of pleasure: an overview- erotic = pleasure, desire, excitement. Media erotics explores the array of resistive pleasures that audiences derive from media by examining the various sensuous, creative and transgressive ways in which persons use and interpret media. Plaisir (consumptive)- describes a comfortable and comforting pleasure that emerges from a passive interaction with the text. A hegemonic pleasure; a comfortable and comforting pleasure that reproduces dominant culture/subjectivity. Dominant (hegemonic): the gaze; form, genre and narrative. Jouissance (productive)- which is often translated into english as bliss, ecstasy, or orgasm is an ecstatic and disruptive pleasure that emerges from an active engagement with the text. A radically disruptive pleasure; an elusive and ecstatic pleasure that destabilizes culture/subjectivity. Writerly (open) texts- is more unfinished and unsettled and, thus, invites the audience to co- create its meaning. Intertextuality- concerns the ways that texts gesture or refer to other texts.
