Bridging previous weeks & this week

Dominant ideology & decoding
Polysemic responses to texts
Hegemony as an open, fluid series of negotiations
Texts & contexts

Culture

Not simply the products made by particular artists
[how the audience is located within specific cultural situations]
[not just the culture of the media, but the culture of the audiences as well—and how the 2 come together]
[it's [...]

Encoding-Decoding

Interpretation vs effects

Not an either/or.
We’re all affected by meaning. It’s just difficult to find them.
The way in which we find these effects is by talking to people who are making these meanings

The role of meaning-making

So how do we interpret meanings?

Meanings are received and made sense of via CODES
Meanings are not force fed to us; but [...]

Introduction to Audience Studies

Historically, audiences had to be present. i.e. in a speech
The printing press and radio allowed for messages to be consumed by many people without their physical presence
During a play, audiences have an interactive relationship with performers. You can see their responses, i.e. their laughter or disgust.
You have the option of auditing something, [...]

Peyton Place (Novel)
The main plot follows the lives of three women - lonely and repressed Constance MacKenzie, her illegitimate daughter Allison, and her employee Selena Cross, a girl from “across the tracks” or as it is called in the book “from the shacks” - and how they come to terms with their identity as women [...]

Pierre Macherey, “A Theory of Literary Production” (textbook)
The book proposes nothing less than a new way of reading, which, for Macherey, is not about the reproduction of a meaning that already exists and merely lies waiting to be discovered by the critic. Traditional criticism, he notes, has a “tendency to slide into the natural fallacy [...]

This Hour Has Seven Days - Very personal attacks on issues – controversial – lots of trouble with censorship

Uses different types of structures: traditional journalism, satire, editorial, documentary
Goes from light-hearted approach to real and serious approaches to public affairs – because of this regarded as unique – not the norm
Creates an unsettling affect on the [...]

Introduction

Science and economic needs, other commercial inputs to science

Objectivity and the Growth of Science

Descriptions of natural objects, personal acquaintance
Scientific revolution occurred during the “first age of global commerce”
Medicine and the life sciences, “folk” traditions of local knowledge
“Head and the hand” reunited in the Renaissance
Knowledge from tradesmen and common people, not just scholars
Reports/specimens from travelers: [...]

Introduction:

Shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric planetary system
By the end of the Scientific Revolution (early 18th century):
Merging of terrestrial and celestial physics
Religious views successfully challenged
New fields of research
Scientific authority and scientific community
Public science
New technologies
These sorts of changes did not [...]

Philosophical Foundations of Science

Theoretical changes and practical gains
Rene Decartes and Francis Bacon
Bacon’s work empirical, observations and common-sense, Descartes rational, logic and reason
Induction – going from the particular to the general
Deduction – going from the general to the particular
Bacon and inductive method, accumulating observations
Descartes and deductive [...]

The Scientific Revolution Part 1

Bernal treats economic and political factors as the sources of the scientific revolution, not the context
Bernal highlights the transformation of the Feudal economy
Rise of monarchy and the bourgeoisie
Technical improvements in agriculture and textile production
Expansion of trade due to improvements in agriculture [...]

Science, Technology and Colonial Expansion

Science and technology, colonial expansion
Capitalism, international trade and European expansion, new resources and land
Technology (sailing ships, telescopes, clocks) and science (astronomy) and navigation, discovery and conquest, colonialism
ASIDE: Technology and Navigation
Mathematical equations: time, distance, angle, longitude or latitude
Angles (sextants), direction (compass), [...]