COMS 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Semiotics, Roland Barthes, Polysemy

• School: Concordia University
• Department: Comm. Studies
• Course: COMS 240
• Professor: Peter Van Wyck

Document Summary

Roland barthes (cid:862)the heto(cid:396)i(cid:272) of the i(cid:373)age(cid:863) Texts direct (dispatches), causing you to no1ce some meanings and not others (selective) Anchoring function: less costly; image does the work. Relay function: text & image are complementary; relays information beyond the image; costly; has a diegetic value. Barthes: rhetoric of the image: sig(cid:374)ifie(cid:396)s a(cid:396)e (cid:272)o(cid:374)(cid:374)otati(cid:448)e: Drawn from system of cultural codes, practices (lexia; together form a lexicon: for eg. , lexicon of sports, wine-tas1ng, of music, etc) Connected to systems: ta(cid:272)ti(cid:272)s: ho(cid:449) use(cid:396)s (cid:374)ego(cid:1005)ate the st(cid:396)ategies that a(cid:396)e put into place. Tactics are temporary and fleeting but essential. For saussure (1959), the signified was a representation of a concept, while the signifier was used to represent the sound-image of that concept. Out of this relationship, the sign is created. Saussure (1959) considered the sign to be arbitrary in nature, based primarily on the relationship between the signified and the signifier.