I had never seen a Hitchcock film before, so watching Vertigo (1958) and reading Blakesley’s Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Defining Visual Rhetorics (2004), was quite eye-opening for me. Blakesley (2003) defines four approaches to film rhetoric (film as language, film as ideology, film interpretation and film identification) and he explains how each approach … [Read more…]
“Rosebud” That simple one-word phrase that Charles Kane utters on his death bed leads us on a quest to understand who this man is and the mystery of Rosebud. Throughout Citizen Kane (1 941), Kane’s identity is revealed through a series of fragments, consisting of stories told from his colleagues, newspaper clippings, and flashbacks. Blakesley … [Read more…]
An overview of Ethnography, specifically the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Metraux, Batille and Mauss. Overview of Nambikwara tribe and studies of rituals, reading and writing.
Simulacra and Mimesis in Walt Disney World By Stacy Cacciatore The readings and videos couldn’t have been more apropos this week, as I visited Walt Disney World at the same time I was reading Baudrillard, Ulmer, Burroughs and Cage. Walt Disney World is overwhelmingly full of simulacra and mimesis, to the point where the line … [Read more…]
My area of interest is the intersection of media rhetoric and the effect on women’s body image. The media plays a tremendous role in sending mixed messages to women about their bodies. The representation of women in the media and popular culture is within a patriarchal gaze, continuously perpetuating the tropes of women as objects … [Read more…]
Abstract: This article examined the semiotic representation of food symbolizing love, sex, and desire in The Sopranos. Throughout the television series The Sopranos, food served as a semiotic representation of love, sex, and desire. Women were portrayed in gender normative roles and used feeding practices to serve men, representing their sexual desires. Alternatively, men were the recipients of food and sexual pleasure. … [Read more…]
In Tasteful Domesticity, Sarah Walden explores the scholarship on cookbooks and how they’ve served as a rhetorical space for women in nineteenth-century America. She claims that Tasteful Domesticity is the first book-length study of women’s rhetoric in American cookbooks (13). Walden posits that cookbooks not only “satisfy Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric as ‘locating the … [Read more…]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa_1spZLre8
