Writing Cultural Critique

Hello!

This week’s reading focuses on Essay 2 and the two student examples given to us on Blackboard. Essay 2 asks us to write a visual cultural critique and thus can be about subjects like class, gender, race, age, etc. and can offer important lessons about all of them.

We ask you to read the two Essay 2 examples provided on Blackboard then answer the following questions:

• What aspects of cultural critique are you writing about?
• What theory are you going to use to frame the subject and why?
• Is there anything from the two essays that you particularly liked and were thinking about incorporating in your paper? Conversely, are there things to avoid?

As a reminder, here are the theories that we are using in Essay 2:

• Roland Barthes’ theory of Denotative and Connotative meanings
• Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism and the Other
• Laura Mulvey’s theory of the Male Gaze

We also invite you to share the challenges you’re having in writing this paper. It might lead to new ideas/perspectives about your subject that you could then incorporate in your paper, and we’re all for creating stronger papers.

With that, we hope you all stay safe and have an easy time navigating the rest of the semester!

Photography and Rhetoric

 This week we are looking at Roland Barthes theory “The Rhetoric of The Image” and how images can be used to convey information with little or without the use of words. Even so we are a writing based society, images and pictures can still constitute meaning for us, especially in the context of advertising. Barthes talked a lot about the use of imagery in ads, such as the Panzani ad which he examined in the piece. For reference, the image can be found below.

Thus for this prompt, we are asking you go out and get creative. Take a personal picture (that means you are the photographer) and analyze the image that you’ve taken. Explain the connotative and denotative meanings in your photograph that Barthes speaks of and, if you’d like, identify any other signifiers that you can find. If there are words in the image you’ve taken, identify their function or literary message as either anchorage or relay. Be sure to include where you took the image by giving a general location.