Powerpoint

I was really interested to see if I could pull together a coherent presentation on semiotics.  It's a subject that has been floating around some of the literary criticism stuff I've been reading.  I first noticed it Paul de Man's work The Resistance to Theory, which talked about the instability of transferring meaning by rhetorical language.  In his mind, rhetoric such as irony or certain tropes are signifiers which are firmly entrenched in the ephemeral realm of social use, and therefore inherently unstable and relative to the signified.  I didn't know at first that this was referencing semiotics until he named it.  I then did some reading around and noticed how many people in academia owe their work to this subject-- philosophers, linguists, cultural anthropologists, mythologists, etc.  And I then found out that it all went back to the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who developed a theory of signs that became modern semiotics.  So, in reading some literature on him and some modern usages of the subject, I was able (I hope) to come up with a informational presentation.  I really liked Hannah's presentation on the Bechdel Test.  This was the first time I've heard about it, but it makes sense to analyze movies in this way, with us living in such a male dominated society and all (and movies being one of the main sources of cultural information).  I thought the use of imagery from those movies made it even more effective, especially the "pass/fail" portion.  I also liked Paige's on Sloths.  I just think that sloths are really interesting animals, and her use of information on how to help them combined with the good use of video and pictures made it a very effective and enjoyable presentation.