Further+Reading

This page contains further scholarly readings outside of those in class that are applicable to the concepts we have studied in the course. Each source is accompanied by a summary or analysis, and the page is organized by those areas we have addressed on our syllabus. This page can serve as a reference for those interested in investigating these concepts further, a source for anyone looking to make connections to other areas of scholarship, or a place to find something worthwhile to read in spare time.

**__HOW DO WE MAKE MEANING? TEXTS AND NARRATIVES__** **Language & Truth: Terministic Screens as Social Constructions** Burke, K. (1966). “Terministic screens.” //Language as symbolic action.// Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Burke’s piece addresses the discussion between language and truth, and ties in with our look at meaning-making. He introduces the idea of the ‘terministic screen’ as a rhetorical tool and a channel through which to understand reality. The terministic screen serves as a set of representations or symbols that become a filter through which the world makes sense to us. By ‘terministic’ he refers to the language choices we make when framing an argument. ‘Screen’ is a frame or a process of selection; a way of limiting language to a particular set of related meanings. Overall, then, it is a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology.

Burke’s discussion of this terministic screen also relates to social constructions. When something is socially constructed, it is based on the contingent variables and concepts created by society rather than any inherent qualities that it possesses. This idea relates to Burke because concepts are human made and a part of language. Burke’s terministic screens can be applied as an example social constructionism in terms of culture and different portrayals of beauty. Beauty is something culturally relative that can be influenced by different experiences and influences. The different images and language we use in society to refer to beauty - whether through media, advertisements, talking about beauty, etc. – help us to determine what is considered beautiful. As Burke pointed out, language doesn’t simply reflect reality but also helps us to select and deflect it. Beauty is not inherent. We possess our own frames of reference for the interpretation of beauty as well as what we see in the rest of the world. Burke’s idea of terministic screens is useful to reference when handling inquiries dealing with the idea of culture and social constructionism; it could also probably be helpful in looking at the ideologies of different cultures in advertisements and the media.

**Semiotics & Texts: Meaning Making through Genre** Devitt, A.J. (2004). “A theory of genre.” //Writing genres.// Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Bawarshi, A. (2000) “The genre function.” //College English, 63//(3). 335-360. Bawarshi, A. (2003). “Greeting cards and the articulation of desire.” //Genre and the invention of the writer//. Logan: Utah State University Press.

These texts tie into our discussion of semiotics and how we make meaning through texts and narratives. They both discuss the “genre” as something that helps constitute our discourses, situations, identities, roles and social contexts within society.

Barwarshi introduces the idea of the “genre function” much like the author function. The genre function “constitutes all discourses’ and all writers’ modes of existence, circulation, and functioning within a society” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 338). It constitutes responses, reactions, and assumed subject roles in relation to situations (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 341). Thus it “rhetorically constitutes our social realities” as it is “the social and rhetorical scene within which we enact various social practices, relations, and identities” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 357). Because genres “function on an ideological level, constituting discursive reality,” their role, then, is to provide “the ideological context in which a text and its participants function and attain cultural value” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 349). Genre acts as a social semiotic, representing “the vehicle through which communicants interact with a situation type” and creating the conditions in which texts, writers, and readers function (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 351). Furthermore, Devitt situates genre’s place “between the textual and the contextual, the individual action and the social system” and “between an individual’s actions and a socially defined context” (29, 31).

Devitt comments that “genre and situation are reciprocal, mutually constructed, and integrally interrelated” (25). Their relationship must be reciprocal and dynamic “because people construct genre through situation and situation through genre” (Devitt 21). In this reciprocal relationship, “situations and their participants are always in the process of reproducing each other within genre” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 354). As “typified sociorhetorical actions,” genres are essential for reproducing the situations to which they in turn respond; they shape social realities and people, while people also shape them (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 353). Furthermore, “genres are both functional and epistemological” – they help us function in situations while also helping shape our recognition of situations (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 340).

Genre can shape and enable social actions by rhetorically constituting the recognition of situations in which we function, and we all function “within genre-constituted realities within which we assume genre-constituted identities” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 340, 354). Thus, genre is constitutive of identities within and related to discourse and social action and identity construction are genre-mediated and genre-constituted (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 343). The context of situation is not only a physical fact but also constructed by people and their actions around that discourse; this in combination decides what is relevant and constitutes the situation (Devitt 19). In genres, an “individuals’ actions construct and are constructed by recurring context of situation, context of culture, and context of genres” (Devitt 31). Existing ideological and material contacts help to construct genres but are also constructed by those performing genre actions (Devitt 26-7). This is where culture plays into context. Culture “influences how situation is constructed and how it is seen as recurring in genres” and is “more than an interpretive context for genre but as an element in the dynamic construction of genre” (Devitt 25-6). Furthermore, “genre enables us to assume certain situational roles, roles established by our culture and rhetorically enacted and reproduced by genre” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 354). Also tying into the context of situation is the role of other genres. There are “always already existing genres that are also a significant part of context” and these emphasize the past in the present (Devitt 25, 28). It is these antecedent genres that “play a role in constituting subsequent action, even acts of resistance” (Bawarshi, “Genre Function” 341). Devitt comments that these “preexisting genres are part of what enable individuals to move from their unique experiences and perceptions to a shared construction of recurring situation and genre” (Devitt 20).

**__WHAT DO WE KNOW AND HOW DO WE KNOW IT? DISCOURSES, POWER, CONSTITUTION__** **Modernity & Foucault: Images, Spectatorship, and the Human Subject** Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2009). //Practice of looking: An introduction to visual culture// (2nd ed.)//.// New York: Oxford University Press.

For further reading, this book, particularly chapter three “Modernity: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge,” ties several of the concepts we have studied in class together, particularly to our section on what we know and how we know it. It mentions technology, enlightenment and advancement, the omnipresence of surveillance, spectatorship, power relations, modernity, the human subject, and more.

Sturken and Cartwright discuss the idea of the subject or spectator, particularly in relation to modernity, power relations, and the field of the gaze. They talk about how images are central to the experience of modernity and that they provide a complex field where the systems of power and knowledge, the media of photography and film, and spectators and subjects all play a role in practice of looking. The authors explain the term modernity in terms of its reference to the period of the enlightenment and the historical, cultural, political and economic conditions of this time. According to Sturken and Cartwright (2009), modernity is associated with the idea that technological and social changes are not only beneficial but also imperative to progress. A large portion of their discussion of modernity focuses on Foucault and his ideas of the human subject as constituted in modernity through the discourses of institutional life of the period (Sturken & Cartwright, 2009).

They also discuss spectatorship and its use in visual studies of providing ways to look at looking practices. For example, Sturken and Cartwright (2009) mention three ways: the roles of the unconscious and desire, the role of looking in the formation of the human subject, and the ways that looking is always a relational activity (p. 102). They mention how images contribute to the production of the human subject and give viewers a sense of themselves as an individual through historical and cultural contexts. They initiate a discussion connecting spectatorship and interpellation. This is less about the relationship between the image and the viewer, but instead about the human subject and how interpellation is more specifically about the situation of the viewer in a field of meaning production that involves recognition of oneself as a member of that world of meaning (Sturken & Cartwright, 2009, p. 103).

In terms of power relations, Sturken and Cartwright (2009) use Foucault’s ideas to explain how power systems work to define how things are understood, spoken about, and represented in images. They use his three concepts, panopticism, power/knowledge, and biopower, to do this. The authors expand on the topic of the gaze in length, applying it to ways of looking at images such as the ‘other,’ psychoanalysis, gender, and changing concepts. Particularly of interest is the idea of binary oppositions and cultural stereotypes, identification and the construction of self, unconscious motivations, sexual stereotypes and gender positions, and fantasies. **Technology & Modernity: Ontology and Being** Heidegger, M. (1977//). The question Concerning technology, and other essays.// New York: Garland Publishing.

This reading ties in with several topics we discussed in class, including modernity, technology, and ways of seeing the world or knowing what’s in it. Technology is a conceptual frame to signify progress and modernity. Technological products are objects that signify change, what is new and what is modern. Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” is a philosophical investigation about what technology is and if it is always a necessary good. Heidegger sees the question concerning technology as essentially linked to the question of being. He argues that technology is related to our ontology and way of being. He leads us away from a definition of technology as a means to an end, to an understanding of it as a form of truth-revealing. He argues that the essence of technology is a poetic process of bringing something forth into presence and, as a mode of revealing, “frames” a world that is unfolded or unconcealed in the process.

Heidegger examines the essence of technology and humanity’s role of being with it. He argues that it is our understanding of technology prevents us from understanding more fully our relationship with technology. We are informed by our "instrumental conception" of what technology is and concerned with mastery of it. Therefore, in order to grasp a fuller understanding of humanity’s relation to technology, we need to consider this. We will better understand the essence of technology if we consider our role to it. He also mentions that enframing endangers man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. He says “In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (27). Therefore man can never encounter only himself. By examining ourselves in relation to technology, we can get a better sense of our relationship to everything.

This relates directly to two of the scholars we looked at in class. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s //Dialectic of Enlightenment//, they mention “Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion,” (p. 3, 20). We view everything in our world, including ourselves, through our understanding of technology. Anything that we cannot perceive through this is doubted and we cannot fully understand it.