2016 Book AppliedDiscourseAnalysis PDF

Applied Discourse Analysis
Arthur Asa Berger
Applied Discourse
Analysis
Popular Culture, Media, and Everyday Life
Arthur Asa Berger
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-47180-8 ISBN 978-3-319-47181-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956860
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CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Li’l Abner and Critical Multimodal

Discourse Analysis 1
Part I Communication
2 Communication: What Objects Tell Us 13
3 Language: Speed Dating 21
4 Metaphor: Love Is a Game 29
5 Words: Freud on Dreams 35
6 Images: Advertising 41
7 Signs: Fashion 51
Part II Texts
8 Narratives: Fairy Tales 63
9 Texts: Hamlet 77
v
vi CONTENTS
10 Myths: The Myth Model 91
11 Genres: Uses and Gratifications 99
12 Humor: Jokes 107
13 Intertextuality: Parody 119
Part III Concepts
14 Ritual: Smoking 127
15 Lifestyles: Grid-Group Theory 135
16 Sacred and the Profane: Department Stores

and Cathedrals 145
17 Ideology: The Prisoner 155
18 Culture: Identity 167
19 Nobrow Culture: The Maltese Falcon 179
References 187
Index 191
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic

Communication Arts at San Francisco State University, where he taught
from 1965 until 2003. He received BA in English and Philosophy at the
University of Massachusetts in 1954; MA in journalism at the University
of Iowa (and studied at the Writers’ Workshop there) in 1956, and PhD in
American studies at the University of Minnesota in 1965. He wrote his
dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner. During the academic year
1963–1964, he had a Fulbright scholarship to Italy and taught at the
University of Milan. He spent a year as visiting professor at the Annenberg
School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles in 1984 and taught a short course on advertising in 2002 as a
Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Heinrich Heine University in
Düsseldorf, Germany. In 2012, he spent a month lecturing in Argentina
vii
viii ABOUT THE AUTHOR
on semiotics and media criticism as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. In 2014,

he spent a month as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Belarus State
University lecturing on discourse analysis, media, and popular culture
and three weeks in Iran, where he lectured on media, communication,
and related concerns. He is the author of more than 140 articles and book
reviews, and of more than seventy books on mass media, popular culture,
humor, and everyday life. Among his recent books are Media Analysis
Techniques 5th edition; Seeing Is Believing: An Introduction to Visual
Communication, 4th edition; Understanding American Icons: An
Introduction to Semiotics; The Art of Comedy Writing; Messages: An
Introduction to Communication and Media, Myth and Society. He has
also written a number of academic mysteries: The Hamlet Case,
Postmortem for a Postmodernist, The Mass Comm Murders: Five Media
Theorists Self-Destruct, and Durkheim Is Dead: Sherlock Holmes Is
Introduced to Social Theory. His books have been translated into
German, Swedish, Italian, Korean, Indonesian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish,
Spanish, and Chinese. He has lectured in more than a dozen countries in
the course of his career. Berger is married, has two children and four
grandchildren, and lives in Mill Valley, California.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Li’l Abner and Critical

Multimodal Discourse Analysis
Abstract Intertextual nature of texts and applied discourse analysis are

discussed. Distinctive aspects of this book are found in its design. In each
chapter, after discussing a concept from discourse theory, it applies that
concept to a text of some kind from popular culture, media, and everyday
life. Ideas from prominent discourse theorists are dealt with, different
kinds of discourse analyses are explained, and they are differentiated
from ethnomethodology.
Application The author’s dissertation on the American comic strip

Li’l Abner is offered as an example of multimodal critical discourse
analysis.
Keywords Intertextuality Ethnomethodology Critical discourse

analysis Multimodal discourse analysis
PASSOVER SEDER
How is this book different from other books on discourse analysis? This may
seem like an ordinary question, but the material in italics happens to be
adapted from a small book, the Passover Haggadah, used in all Seder
dinners (the term Seder means “order”) in which a wise son asks “Why
© The Author(s) 2016 1

A.A. Berger, Applied Discourse Analysis,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_1
2 APPLIED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Passover Haggadah
1 INTRODUCTION: LI’L ABNER AND CRITICAL MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE . . . 3
is this night different from all other nights?” This question which I asked
in the first sentence of this book is an example of what communication
scholars call “intertextuality,” which means, roughly speaking, that all
texts borrow from other texts or are intertwined with one another. I will
have a lot more to say about this topic later. It is very important and plays a
major role in the thinking of discourse analysts. According to the Russian
scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, whose thinking is behind intertextual theory, all
texts borrow—in various ways—from other texts, whether the borrowing
is conscious or unconscious.
This book, then, like all books, if Bakhtin is correct, is full of borrow-
ings—of quotations by discourse theorists and others of interest and with
material revised, updated, and transformed in various ways from my writ-
ings over the years. In all cases, when I borrow from others, I quote them
and tell who wrote the passage, so there is a difference between intertex-
tuality and stealing someone else’s material, which we describe as plagiar-
ism. I use quotations because I think that what the people I’m quoting
have to say is important and is expressed in a distinctive way.
Intertextuality suggests that we often imitate others by using their plots,
themes or styles, or other things, and we are generally not conscious that
we are doing so.
I cover a wide variety of topics in this book. You will learn about
discourse theory, language, metaphor, narratives, culture, myths, rituals,
genres, signs (and the science of semiotics), jokes, images, the psyche,
Hamlet, fairy tales, dreams, and love, among other things, and I have
included a number of learning games that will help you learn how to apply
concepts and use them to make sense of the role discourse analysis plays in
our lives, societies, and cultures. So this book differs from other discourse
analysis books in that it focuses upon a wider range of topics relating to
culture than you find in the typical discourse analysis book and applies
concepts from discourse very broadly—perhaps more broadly than tradi-
tional discourse analysts do.
In their book, Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social
Construction, Nelson Phillips and Cynthia Hardy write (2002:6):
Traditional qualitative approaches often assume a social world and then

seek to understand the meaning of this world for participants. Discourse
analysis, on the other hand, tried to explore how the socially produced
ideas and objects that populate the world were created in the first place
and how they are maintained and held in place over time. Whereas other
qualitative methodologies work to understand or interpret social reality

as it exists, discourse analysis endeavors to uncover the way in which it is
produced. This is the most important contribution of discourse analysis:
it examines how language constructs phenomena, how it reflects and
reveals it. In other words, discourse analysis views discourse as constitu-
tive of the social world—not a route to it—and assumes the world
cannot be known separately from discourse.
Discourse analysis deals with our use of language and the way our lan-
guage shapes our identities, our social relationships, and our social and
political world. Discourse analysis is mostly done by linguistics professors,
who used to be confined in their research to the sentence. When the
linguists decided to move beyond the sentence to conversations and
then to literary texts of one kind or another, and then to mass-mediated
texts, linguists identified themselves as discourse analysts. When I searched
“discourse analysis” on Google on August 8, 2015, I got 5,770,000
results. So there is a great deal of interest in the subject.
Teun A. van Dijk
Teun A. van Dijk, a Dutch scholar who is one of the most prominent
contemporary discourse analysts, writes in “The Study of Discourse” in
Discourse as Structure and Process (1997:1):
What exactly is discourse, anyway?

It would be nice if we could squeeze all we know about discourse into a
handy definition. Unfortunately, as is also the case for related concepts as
“language,” “communication,” “interaction,” “society” and “culture” the
notion of discourse is essentially fuzzy. As is so often the case for concepts
that stand for complex phenomena, it is in fact the whole discipline, in this
case the new cross-discipline of discourse studies (also called “discourse
analysis”) that provides the definition of such fundamental concepts.
So understanding what discourse analysis isn’t easy because it is a “fuzzy”

concept.
If you look in dictionaries, you’ll see discourse described as a conversa-
tion or a treatise on some subject. Discourse analysts are interested in how
people use language and how this language shapes their relationships with
others and the institutions in their societies. Many academic disciplines are
interested in language but not the same way that discourse analysts are. Let
me offer an example that will help you understand more about discourse
analysis. In his book Story and Discourse, Seymour Chatman, a professor of
rhetoric at the University of California in Berkeley, discusses narratives—
texts that have a linear or time perspective to them. He writes (1978:19)
Each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire), the content or chain of events
(actions, happenings), plus what might be called the existents (characters,
items of settings); and a discourse (discourse), that is the expression, the
means by which the content is communicated.
The story is the “what” and the discourse is the “how.” And it is the how
that discourse analysis focuses attention on. We can see these relationships
in the chart that I have made based on Chatman’s ideas:
Story Discourse
Events Expression
Content (what happens) Form (how story is told)
Histoire Discourse
Chatman’s discussion helps us understand how discourse analysis differs

from other approaches to communication. The focus, in discourse analy-
sis, is on style and on expression, not only content.
The quote by Phillips and Hardy in the epigraph suggests that discourse
is basic to our social world. From the moment we start to talk, when we
are little children, discourse shapes our existence. At a very early age
children learn what words mean, and around the age of four can put
words together in their own way, and make sentences they’ve never
heard before. As I show in this book, discourse deals not only with
words but also in newer versions of discourse analysis, with images. So
this book will not only deal with theories and concepts related to discourse
analysis but also will show you discourse in action in the real world.
As I suggested earlier, discourse analysis represents an effort by linguists
to move beyond the sentence, which is where linguists traditionally have
focused their attention. Discourse analysts worked on speech and conver-
sation—spoken discourse—before moving on to written discourse and
then, in our brave new world of Internet, to what they call multimodal
discourse analysis. This kind of discourse analysis deals with images and
videos—what is found on Facebook, Pinterest and other social media sites.
A number of discourse analysts write from what they call a “critical”
perspective, meaning an approach that deals with ideology and politics
and is, generally speaking, critical of the political arrangements found in
bourgeois capitalist societies. Since these scholars are interested in what is
going on in contemporary societies they describe themselves as “Critical
Multimodal Discourse Analysts.”
Van Dijk adds other insights into what discourse analysis is in a book he
edited, Discourse as Structure and Process, the first of two volumes of
Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. In his chapter in
this book titled “The Study of Discourse” he describes what discourse
analysis deals with and discusses the three main dimensions of the field
(1997:2):
(a) language use, (b) the communication of beliefs (cognition), and (c)
interaction in social situations. Given these three dimensions, it is not
surprising to find that several disciplines are involved in the study of dis-
course such as linguistics (for the specific study of language and language
use), psychology (for the study of beliefs and how they are communicated),
and the social sciences (for the analysis of interactions in social situations).
It is typically the task of discourse studies to provide integrated descrip-
tions of these three main dimensions of discourse: how does language use
influence beliefs and interaction, or vice versa, how do aspects of interactions
influence how people speak, or how do beliefs control language use and
interaction? Moreover, besides giving systematic descriptions, we may

expect discourse studies to formulate theories that explain such relationships
between language use, beliefs and interaction.
He reminds us that while discourse analysis pays attention to talk and oral
communication, it also studies written language. And written texts. We
can see that it is interested in all kinds of human communication, with a
focus on people’s language use and the interactions among people who are
talking with one another or writing texts of one kind or another. While
scholars from many disciplines focus their attention on the content of
discourse, discourse analysis are more interested in the styles used, in the
way language and images are used and the role language plays in social
interactions.
Discourse analysis is different from ethnomethodology, though both
are interested in conversation. As Dirk vom Lehn, the author of a book on
the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, explains (in a personal com-
munication, 2015):
Ethnomethodologists are ethnomethodologists. Discourse Analysis in my

book is a collection of research methods. Some discourse analysts use
research methods, like conversation analysis, that have been derived from
ethnomethodology. But often they do not use these methods in the spirit of
ethnomethodology. In particular they ignore Garfinkel and Harvey Sack’s
argument that people themselves in their conversations analyze the interac-
tion as and when it happens. And it is this analysis that allows them to
participate in the interaction. Discourse analysts tend to stick to the scien-
tists perspective and use conversation analytic techniques to explore the
organization of talk.
Van Dijk describes discourse analysis as a multi-disciplinary approach

that encompasses semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory,
literary theory, and many other disciplines. So it is a field in which
different kinds of scholars can work and do work, since language and
communication are so central to many qualitative disciplines. Although
many people have never heard the term, it is very popular in academic
circles. One publisher, Routledge, has more than forty books on the
subject and there are hundreds of books on discourse analysis at
Amazon.com. So the question naturally arises—why another book on
the subject?
My answer is that this book is different from other books on discourse

analysis in that it focuses upon applying discourse analysis to popular culture,
media, and everyday life. You will be able to see how the dominant concepts,
theories, and topics discussed by discourse theorists function in the real
world and this will help you better understand the role that discourse plays
in your life and the lives of your friends, families, and loved ones.
Shmoo drawing by AAB
LI’L ABNER AND CRITICAL MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

In 1964, I was a graduate student in the American Studies program at the
University of Minnesota. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Al Capp’s
comic strip Li’l Abner. It was very popular and read by around 200 million
people every day, but some members of the committee (from the English
department and the humanities department) that ruled on topics for
dissertations were not pleased with my choice of subject. My dissertation
advisor, a political theorist named Mulford Q. Sibley had suggested I write
on the topic and the scholars from the social sciences in the American
Studies program went along with Sibley’s suggestion. What I did was write
about Capp’s use of language in the strip, his graphic style, the nature of
his narrative style, and his satire of American culture. All of these topics are
of interest to the newest development in discourse analysis, what is called

“Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis.”
We read, a book by two English scholars, David Machin and Andrea
Mayr’s How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis (2012:1):
While visual analysis has more traditionally been the domain of Media and
Cultural Studies, linguists. . . . have begun to develop some of their own
models for analysis that draw on the same kinds of precision and more
systematic kinds of description that characterized the approach to language
in CDA. These authors began to look at how language, image and other
modes of communication such as toys, monuments, films, sounds, etc.
combine to make meaning. This has broadly been referred to as “multi-
modal” analysis. Not all of this work has adopted the kind of critical
approach used in CDA, where the aim is to reveal buried ideology.
What this passage suggests to me is that in 1964, when I wrote my

dissertation on Li’l Abner, I was functioning as a multimodal critical
discourse analyst, though I’d never heard of the term “discourse
analysis” because I was not trained in linguistics and linguists were
not yet at the multimodal stage of development for discourse analysis.
The concept of multimodal critical discourse analysis had not yet been
invented.
As an example of Capp’s remarkable use of language, let me quote a
passage from the strip—which was about a zany collection of country
bumpkins and other types living in a mythical “Dogpatch” in the
United States. Here is “Marryin’ Sam’s” description of what he does
for an eight-dollar wedding, from my Li’l Abner: A Study in American
Satire (1994:58)
Fust—Ah strips t’ th’ waist an’ rassles th’ four biggest guests!! Next—a fast
demon-stray-shun o’ how t’ cheat your friends at cards!!—followed by four
snappy jokes—guaranteed t’ embarrass man or beast—an’ then after ah
dances a jig wif a pag, Ah yanks out tow o’ mah teeth and presents ‘em t’
th’ bride an’ groom—as mementos o’ th’ occasion!!—then—Ah really gits
goin!!—Ah offers t’ remove any weddin’ guest’s appendix, with mah bare
hands—free!! Then yo spread-eagles me, fastens mah arem an’ laigs t’ four
wild jackasses—an’—bam!! yo’ fires a gun!!—While they tears me t’ pieces—
Ah puffawms th’ wedding cermony.
My book has chapters on Li’l Abner’s place in American Satire, on

Capp’s narrative technique, on Capp’s use of dialogue, and on social
criticism and the pictorial image. It would take fifty years for me to
discover that in 1964 I was what we now call a critical multimodal
discourse analyst.
PART I
Communication
CHAPTER 2
Communication: What Objects Tell Us
Abstract Different definitions of the term are offered from communication

theorists. Roman Jakobson’s model of communication process is described.
Importance of nonverbal communication is mentioned along with the way
messages are transmitted through language or other methods. Umberto Eco’s
definition of a sign is mentioned along with his caution that signs can be used
to lie.
Application Objects are shown to transmit messages about owners and the
ways in which they are used. Work of motivation researcher Ernest Dichter is
discussed. Learning games in which students analyze messages they find in an
object and what the owner of objects thinks the object means is described.
Keywords Objects Material culture Nonverbal communication Signs
Though communication is certainly a tool for conducting the everyday business

of our lives, it is also at the core of who we are, what we think, and what we do.
The debate over whether communication reflects or creates the reality we call our
lives oversimplifies the relationship between communication and the things
about which we communicate. . . . Our communication reflects the world within
and around us, and simultaneously creates it. For now, “symbols shape mean-
ing” is a phrase that best captures the idea that communication gives meaning to
reality, whether reality is an object in the physical world or an idea in our minds.
Imagining the meaning of any pre-existing thing or thought in this world,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_2
untouched by communication, is difficult. . . . In short, communication plays a

significant role in who we are, what we know, and what we do.
Jodi R. Cohen, Communication Criticism: Developing Your
Critical Powers
Whether we are considering ordinary conversation, a public speech, a letter,

or a poem, we always find a message which proceeds from a sender to
a receiver. These are the most obvious aspects of communication. But
a successful communication depends on three other aspects of the event as
well: the message must be delivered through a contact, physical and/or
psychological; it must be framed in a code, and it must refer to a context.
In the area of context, we find what a message is about. But to get there we
must understand the code in which the message is framed—as in the present
case, my messages reach you through the medium of an academic/literary
subcode of the English language. And even if we have the code, we under-
stand nothing until we make contact with the utterance; in the present case,
until you see the printed words on this page (or hear them read aloud) they
do not exist as a message for you.
Robert Scholes, Structuralism: An Introduction. New Haven,
CN: Yale University Press. 1974.
Communication, as linguists such as Roman Jakobson have suggested,

involves sending messages and interpreting how these messages “work.”
In Denis McQuail and Sven Windahl’s we find a number of definitions of
the term “communication” by scholars (1993:4):
The transmission of information, ideas, attitudes, or emotion from one

person or group to another (or others) primarily through symbols.
(Theodorson and Theodorson, 1969)
In the most general sense, we have communication wherever one system, a
source, influences another, the destination, by manipulation of alternative
symbols, which can be transmitted over the channel connecting them.
(Osgood et al. 1957)
Communication may be defined as ‘social interaction through messages.’
(Gerbner 1967).
Another definition of communication is offered by semiotician Marcel

Danesi (2002:220):
Social interaction through messages; the production and exchange of mes-

sages and meanings; the use of specific modes and media to transmit messages.
2 COMMUNICATION: WHAT OBJECTS TELL US 15
McQuail and Windahl offer their own definition of communication (1993:5):
Thus, in the most general terms, communication involves a sender, a

channel, a message, a receiver, a relationship between sender and receiver,
an effect, a context in which communication occurs and a range of things
to which “messages” refer . . . Communication can be any or all of the
following: an action on others; an interaction with others and a reaction
to others.
There is a common theme to these definitions: central to the communica-

tion process are the messages that people send back and forth to one
another, and it is discourse analysis, which deals with how we find meaning
in messages sent by others and affected by these messages, that informs
this book.
The McQuail and Windahl definition of communication is similar to
one of the most important and widely discussed models of communica-
tion, which comes from Roman Jakobson, a Russian linguist who lived
from 1896 to 1982. He taught at institutions such as Harvard University
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his ideas were very
influential. In his model, someone, a sender, sends a message (with some
kind of information) to a receiver. The message is transmitted by a code
(such as the English language) using a contact (or medium, such as
speech). The context in which a message is sent also plays an important
role in helping the receiver make sense of the message.
Roman Jakobson
There are six elements in Jakobson’s model which is shown below

(found in Berger 2016:92):
Context
Message
Sender ————————————— Receiver
Contact (Medium)
Code
The message is affected by the context in which it is sent (we speak

differently in bars and university seminars), the medium used (such as
speech) and the code (such as the French or English language).
We also recognize that speech—that is words—is not the only way of
sending messages. A considerable percentage of the information in the
messages we send and receive come from nonverbal communication. I am
talking about things like gestures, facial expression and body language
when we are speaking and semiotic signs we send by things such as our
hair style, hair colors, style of clothing, objects we carry (I call them props)
and that kind of thing. As David Matsumoto, Mark G. Frame, Hi Sung
Hwang (eds.) explain, in their book Nonverbal Communication: Science
and Applications (2013:4):
Although “language” often comes to mind when considering communica-

tion, no discussion of communication is complete without the inclusion of
nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication has been referred to
as “body language” in popular culture since the publication of Julius Fast’s
book of the same name in 1970. Researchers, however, have defined non-
verbal communication as encompassing almost all of human communication
except the spoken and written word. (Knapp 1972). We also define non-
verbal communication as the transfer and exchange of messages in any and all
modalities that do not include words. As we discuss shortly, one of the major
ways by which nonverbal communication occurs is through nonverbal beha-
viors, which are behaviors that occur during communication that do not
include verbal language. But our definition of nonverbal communication
implies that it is more than body language. It can be the distance people
stand when they converse. It can be the sweat stains in their armpits. It can
be the design of the room. Nonverbal communication is a broader category
than nonverbal behavior, encompassing the way you dress, the place of your
office within a larger building, the use of time, the bumper stickers you place
on your car, or the arrangement, lighting, or color of your room.
Their point is that nonverbal communication involves the exchange of

messages not involving words but involving what semioticians would
describe as signs, which, as Umberto Eco reminds us, are anything that
can be used to stand for something else and to lie. Communication is a
complicated process and in something that might seem to be simple,
our conversations, we find that our words, our facial expressions, our
body language, our gestures, and where the conversation is taking
place, play an important role in shaping the way the messages we
send are received by others and the messages others send are received
by us.
Shell Photo by author (Photograph by Arthur Asa Berger)
APPLICATIONS: OBJECTS AS MESSAGES

When I taught a seminar in semiotics many years ago at San Francisco
State University, I devised a little exercise that turned out to be
extremely interesting. One week I asked students to get an unmarked
brown paper bag (typically used for sandwiches) and put some com-
mon object that reflected something about them in it, along with
a piece of paper listing what they believed the object reflected about
them. What this exercise involved, among other things, was using
material culture to reflect the owner’s personality and taste. As Ernest

Dichter explained in his book The Strategy of Desire (1960/2002:91):
The objects which surround us do not simply have utilitarian aspects; rather,
they serve as a kind of mirror which reflects our own image. Objects which
surround us permit us to discover more and more aspects of ourselves.
Owning a boat, for example, for a person who did not own a boat before,
produces new understandings of aspects of his own personality; and also a
new bond of communication is established with all boat owners. At the same
time some of the power strivings of the individual come out more clearly
into the open, in the speed attained, the ability to manipulate the boat; and
the conquest of a new medium, water, in the form of lakes and rivers and the
ocean, becomes a new discovery.
In a sense, therefore, the knowledge of the soul of things is possibly a
very direct and new and revolutionary way of discovering the soul of man.
The power of various types of objects to bring out into the open new aspects
of the personality of modern man is great. The more intimate knowledge of
as many different types of products a man has, the richer his life will be. . . .
The things which surround us motivate us to a very large extent in our
everyday behavior. They also motivate us as the goals of our life—the
Cadillac that we are dreaming about, the swimming pool that we are work-
ing for, the kind of clothes, the kind of trips, and even the kind of people we
want to meet from a social-status viewpoint are influencing factors. In the
final analysis objects motivate our life probably at least as much as the
Oedipus complex or childhood experiences do.
Dichter, one of the founding fathers of motivation research, argues that

the things we own are much more meaningful than we might imagine.
With this insight from Dichter in mind, let us return to the brown bags I
asked my students to bring to class.
The next week the students all brought in brown bags into which they
had placed objects that reflected their personalities, taste and so on. The
bags all looked the same so we had no way of knowing who put what into
a bag. I opened one bag and pulled out a seashell of about six inches.
I held it up and asked the students to tell me what they got from the sea
shell. The answers from my class were terms like “empty,” “sterile,”
“dead.” Then I took the slip of paper on which the person who put the
shell into the bag wrote what the shell signified and the terms were
“natural,” “beautiful,” and “refined.” For discourse analysts, the terms
used by the students about the shell and the terms used by the student
who brought the shell tell us a great deal. The woman who brought the
shell thought of it in aesthetic terms while the students in the class thought
about it in functional terms. What this shows is that people can differ
greatly in the way they interpret objects, and by implication, all forms of
communication—both verbal and nonverbal.
What did the students learn from this exercise? The most important
thing they learned is that people don’t always interpret the messages we
send the way we think they will. You think that you are sending “beautiful”
and “natural” to others and they are interpreting your messages as “empty”
and “sterile.” We must always assume, then, that our messages may be
interpreted the wrong way. We can attempt to deal with this by sending
other messages to help clarify our original message and by being redundant
so the receivers of our messages have a better chance of interpreting them
correctly or remembering them. You will find a certain amount of redun-
dancy in this book. It represents my attempt to make sure my messages are
interpreted correctly and, I hope, that you remember the messages.
CHAPTER 3
Language: Speed Dating
Abstract Work of Saussure on semiotics is discussed, with a focus on signs

and on differential nature of concepts.
Peter Farb’s work on language is explained, and rules behind language
use are mentioned. Ideas by linguist Francisco Yus about gaps in conversa-
tions are offered.
Application Work by James Pennebaker on speed dating is considered

and the way in which language use can predict which players will date after
speed-dating sessions. Language use is shown to be a reflection of people’s
identities.
Keywords Semiotics Signs Concepts Speed dating Language
For human beings, society is a primary reality, not just the sum of individual
activities . . . and if one wishes to study human behavior, one must grant that
there is a social reality . . . Since meanings are a social product, explanation
must be carried out in social terms . . . Individual actions and symptoms can
be interpreted psychoanalytically because they are the result of common
psychic processes, unconscious defenses occasioned by social taboos and
leading to particular types of repression and displacement. Linguistic com-
munication is possible because we have assimilated a system of collective
norms that organize the world and give meaning to verbal acts. Or again, as
Durkheim argued, the reality crucial to the individual is not the physical

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_3
environment but the social milieu, a system of rules and norms, of collective
representations, which makes possible social behavior.
Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (1986:86:87)
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable

to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite
formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these
systems.
A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would
be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology;
I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeȋon “sign”). Semiology would
show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science
does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to
existence, a place staked out in advance.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Saussure drawing
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose book, Course in General

Linguistics (first published in French in 1915 comprised of notes on his
lectures by two of his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye), is
considered to be one of the most influential books published in the nine-
teenth century. It is one of the foundational texts of semiotics, the science
of signs. Saussure used the term semiology—literally “words about
3 LANGUAGE: SPEED DATING 23
signs”—but it has been supplanted by the term semiotics, which was used
by the other founding father of semiotics, Charles S. Peirce. Saussure
makes a number of important points, in the third chapter of the book,
“The Object of Linguistics.” He explains that (1966:9) “language [lan-
gue] is not to be confused with human speech [langage] of which it is only
a definite part, though certainly an essential one.” Later he adds (1966:13)
“Execution is always individual, and the individual is always its master.
I shall call the executive side speaking [parole]. It is the speaking and writing
done by individuals that is most interest to discourse analysts.”
We then have three insights from Saussure relating to language:
Langue Langage Parole
Language Human Speech Speaking

Social institution Vocabulary Individual act
We can say that language is a social institution and involves, for people
who speak English, the approximately two hundred thousand words in the
English language. Speech refers to the vocabulary of an individual and
speaking refers to the words used by an individual when speaking to
someone or to some group of people. We can also think of speaking as
involving “writing” by individuals and other forms of communication,
such as gestures and body language.
Saussure made another important point relative to language. He writes
(1966:117):
Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content
but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their
most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.
Later he adds (1966:120, 21) “In language there are only differences . . .
The entire mechanism of language, with which we shall be concerned later, is
based on oppositions.”
These two statements are of great importance. Concepts, we learn, have
no meaning in themselves but take their meaning from the system (the
collections of words, we may say) in which they are embedded, and the
most important “difference” in language is the polar opposition. “Happy”
and “sad” are oppositions; “happy” and “unhappy” is a negation, not an

opposition. If Saussure is correct, we make sense of the world by interpreting
concepts in terms of their oppositions, and that is built into the nature of
language.
Boy talking
Discourse analysis grew out of linguistics and is primarily interested in

language and the role it plays in our lives—though in recent years, as I’ve
explained earlier, multimodal discourse analysts have turned their atten-
tion to images, videos, and related matters. Although we may not under-
stand how language “works,” language is based on rules we learn as we
grow up. As Peter Farb, a linguist, explains in Word Play: What Happens
When People Talk (1974:6, 9, 10, 294):
The language game is similar to other games in that it is structured by rules,

which speakers unconsciously learn simply by belonging to a particular
speech community . . . By the age of four or so they have mastered most of
the exceedingly complex and abstract structures of their native tongues. In
only a few more years children possess the entire linguistic system that allows
them to utter and to understand sentences they have not previously heard.
Language is both a system of grammar and a human behavior which can
be analyzed according to theories of interaction, play, and games. It can also
be viewed as a shared system of rules and conventions, mutually intelligible
to all members of a particular community, yet a system which nevertheless
offers freedom and creativity in its use. . . . A language is like a game played
with a fixed number of pieces—phonemes—each one easily recognized by
native speakers. This is true of every language, except that the pieces change
from one language game to another. Linguists . . . generally agree that the
language game is played with the following 45 phoneme “pieces”:
21 consonants
9 vowels
4 semivowels (y, w, r)
4 stresses
4 pitches
1 juncture (pause between words)
3 terminal contours (to end sentences)
These 45 phonemes used in English today represent the total sound

resources by which speakers can create an infinity of utterances. . . . For
the rest of his life the child will speak sentences he has never before
heard, and when he thinks or reads, he will still literally talk to himself.
He can never escape from speech. And from speech flow all the other
hallmarks of our humanity: those arts, sciences, laws, morals, customs,
political and economic systems, and religious faiths that collectively are
known as “culture.”
We may not be aware of it, but when we speak, we always are following a
number of complicated rules that we unconsciously acquire and interna-
lize. That’s what learning a language involves.
According to Farb, by around one year of age children generally can
speak recognizable words and by four we can speak sentences. While the
English language has several hundred thousand words, they are all
created, Farb says, out of just three dozen sounds—which are selected
from the many different sounds of which the human voice is capable.
Our languages enable us to speak to one another—using words—to

convey information, feelings, and all kinds of other things. What dis-
course analysts suggest is that language is the cornerstone of culture
and it is our words that shape, in varying degrees, our sense of our-
selves, our societies, and of our place in the universe.
As Francisco Yus, a Spanish linguistics professor, reminds us (personal
communication), our conversations are full of gaps that are filled in by
those with whom we are speaking: He writes, “ When people talk to each
other, what people literally code (i.e. “say”) on most occasions undeter-
mine (that is, is less informative) the thoughts that the speaker really
intends to communicate with these words. Normally, hearers are con-
stantly fixing the real meaning of utterances from the ‘skeleton,’ as it
were, of the words encoded.” Yus suggests that when we converse we
generally don’t transmit as much information as we think we’re doing but
since we’re also geared toward making sense of whatever is transmitted
due to our natural disposition to make what we hear relevant. This is based
on our general background of knowledge and, in conversations, what was
said earlier in the conversation and our notions about what might be said
in the future. We will learn more about this when I discuss the ideas of
Mikhail Bakhtin, an influential Russian communications theorist.
APPLICATION: LANGUAGE AND SPEED DATING

A psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, James Pennebaker,
has found that the language people use during speed-dating sessions can
be used to predict who will go out on a date with whom. Pennebaker
makes a distinction between what he calls “function words” and “con-
tent” words. As he explains in an interview with Katherine Streeter on
National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, September 1, 2014, “function
words” such as the, this, though, I, and, am are filler words that we use
between “content words” such as “school,” “family,” and “live,” which
are related to the substance of what we are talking about and conjure, in
our minds, specific images. Someone who works at a bank uses different
“content” words when talking about his or her work than someone who
is a taxi driver, but they use similar “function” words.
What Pennebaker did was record and transcribe conversations
between people who were participating in speed-dating meetings. He
also obtained information about the way people involved in speed
dating “perceived” how they were progressing. After analyzing his
data he discovered “We can predict by analyzing their language who

will go on a date—who will match—at rates better than the people
themselves.” The key to his research was the way the two people
involved in speed dating used “function” words, such as prepositions,
pronouns, and articles. If they did so in a similar way, they were more
likely to go on a date.
This is because, he suggests, when two people are interested in one
another, the way they use language shifts in subtle ways. When they find
themselves paying close attention to one another, without being aware of
what they are doing, they tend to use language the same way. He con-
cludes that changing your language doesn’t change who you are, but
changing who you are changes the way you use language. Our language,
then, is a reflection of our identities. Language plays a much more impor-
tant role in our lives—including our love lives, than we might imagine. As
Pennebaker points out, our language use reflects our character and
personality.
CHAPTER 4
Metaphor: Love Is a Game
Abstract Metaphor is shown to be fundamental to our thinking.

Metaphor and metonymy are defined, and subcategories of metaphor
and metonymy, simile and synecdoche are discussed. Work of George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson on the important role metaphor and metonymy
play in everyday life is considered.
Application Analysis of notion that love is a game, taken from popular

ballad from many years ago, is dealt with and implications of the metaphor
upon our lives and thinking is explained. Example of implications of love
seen as a game and possible impact on relationships is considered.
Keywords Metaphor Metonymy Simile Synecdoche Love Games
We all naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily: words
express ideas, and therefore those words are the most agreeable that enable
that enable us to get hold of new ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us;
ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that
we can best get hold of something fresh.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, III, 1410b
Aristotle—the one who coined the term metaphor—itself a metaphor (meta

“beyond” + pherein “to carry”)—saw the power of figurative reasoning in its
ability to shed light on abstract concepts. However, he affirmed that, as

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_4
conceptually powerful as it was, its primary function was stylistic, a device for
sprucing up more prosaic and literal ways of communication. Remarkably,
this latter position became the rule by which figurative language came to be
judged in Western philosophy ever since. But as a seminal study by Pollio,
Barlow, Fine and Pollio (1977) showed, Aristotle’s original view was in
effect the correct one. Those researchers found that speakers of English
uttered, on average, 3,000 novel verbal metaphors and 7,000 idioms per
week. Shortly thereafter, it became clear to language scientists that meta-
phor was hardly an optional flourish on literal language. On the contrary,
they started discovering that it dominated everyday communication and was
the source of many symbolic practices.
Marcel Danesi, Why It Sells. 2008. (60–61)
As Marcel Danesi, a Canadian media scholar, points out in the epigraph

above, metaphor and metonymy are not just figures of speech used in
poetry but are fundamental to our thinking in everyday life. Metaphor is
based on analogy and metonymy on association. There are weaker forms
of each. Simile is based on analogy but uses “like” or “as” in comparison
to metaphor which uses “is.” Thus, “my love is a red rose” is a metaphor
and “my love is like a red rose” is a simile. Metaphor and metonymy have a
basic role: transmitting meaning. For example, we are using a simile when
we say “He’s as sharp as a razor” or “She’s as good as an angel.” We often
use similes in our everyday speech to convey certain ideas. For example:
The ship danced through the waves. (The ship is like a dancer.)
The ship snaked through the waves. (The ship is like a snake.)
The ship raced through the waves. (The ship is like a race car.)
The ship pranced through the waves. (The ship is like a horse.)
The ship plowed through the waves. (The ship is like a plow.)
The ship takes on different identities in these examples). These verbs

convey information that is different from that in the statement “The ship
sailed through the waves.”
In metonymy, we have to know certain things in order for the associa-
tion to make sense. If you don’t know that Rolls Royce automobiles are
expensive, using them to suggest “high class” or “sophistication” doesn’t
make any sense. As James Monaco (1977:135) has noted:
A metonymy is a figure of speech in which an associated detail or notion is

used to invoke an idea or represent an object. Etymologically, the word
4 METAPHOR: LOVE IS A GAME 31
means “substitute naming” (from the Greek meta, involving transfer, and
onoma, name). Thus in literature we can speak of the king (and the idea of
kingship) as “the crown.”
A commonly used form of metonymy is a synecdoche, in which a part is

used to stand for the whole or the whole is used to stand for a part. Thus,
the “White House” stands for the American presidency and the
“Pentagon” stands for the American military.
It is often the case that metaphor and metonymy are mixed together,
and sometimes a given object might have both metaphoric and metonymic
significance. For example, snakes, in psychoanalytic theory, are phallic
symbols (they are like penises in that they are long and thin) and snakes
also are metonymically associated with Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden.
Recognizing the relationship between metaphor and metonymy is impor-
tant, because it enables us to see more clearly how objects and images (as well
as language) generate meaning. And, in the case of metonymy, it becomes
obvious that people carry around in their heads highly complex patterns of
associations that enable them to interpret metonymic communication
correctly.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain the role that metaphor plays
in our everyday lives. They write in Metaphors We Live By (1980:3):
Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the
rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language.
Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as a characteristic of language alone, a
matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people
think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on
the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language
but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which
we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphoric in nature. The concepts
that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern
our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts
structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we
relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in
defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our concep-
tual system is largely metaphorical, what we experience and what we do every
day is very much a matter of metaphor. . . . The concepts that govern our
thoughts are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday
functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what
we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other
people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our every-
day realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely
metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do
every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
So metaphor and its allied concept, metonymy, help shape the way we
think about things because our conceptual system is basically metaphoric
and metonymic. And as Danesi points out, the way we talk about things,
since we use something like 3,000 novel verbal metaphors a week in our
conversations.
To show the power of metaphor, in the application section I will discuss
a song, based on metaphor, and suggest that metaphors also have logical
implications that we seldom notice or think about, but which play an
important role in our lives.
Game of Love Drawing

4 METAPHOR: LOVE IS A GAME 33
APPLICATION: LOVE IS A GAME

There was a syrupy ballad that was popular many years ago—in the fifties
or sixties—called “It’s All in the Game” which made the argument that
love is a game. One of the lines in the song is about “the wonderful game
called love.” If we say “Love is a game,” that is a metaphor; if we say “love
is like a game,” that is a simile. There are endless metonymic associations
that go in our minds when we hear the word “love,” such as romance,
weddings, families, and so on. Love is one of the most important words in
the English language and calls to mind endless images, in our minds,
about romantic love.
If love is a game or even like a game, it is worth thinking about the
nature of games. I used to play a learning game when I taught in which I
asked students to think about the characteristics of games and then think
about whether they apply to love. Here are some of the aspects of games
that my students came up with.
Games are not serious. They are relatively trivial and we stop playing
them when we are bored.
Games have winners and losers. What, we may ask, does it mean to
“lose” in the game of love? And what does it mean to “win.” If one person
wins in a love relationship does it mean the other person loses?
Games have rules that players must follow. If you don’t have rules,
you don’t have a game. What are the “rules” of love? Is one rule “I
don’t . . . on a first date?”
Games are marred by people cheating. If love is a game and people
“cheat” in the game, does that excuse the cheating? Is the cheating not
important? We might also ask, “how do people cheat in the game of love?”
Games end. When people get bored playing a game, the stop playing
it. Does this apply to love? And what does it mean to be “bored” in the
game of love?
Games often involve trickery, pretense, and deceit. Think, for exam-
ple of the game of poker, in which players avoid giving information to
others about their hands (what are called “tells”) and often bluff. What
role should trickery, pretense, and deceit play in the game of love? What
role do they play in some love relationships?
Games are sometimes played for a stake. What does one bet in the game
of love? What does the winner win and the loser lose in the game of love?
Games are often played more than once. You lose one game and win
the next. Does the fact that we often play games more than once suggest
that love is a game that we should play more than once? Is love something
that can be played many times and can it played just as well, or even better,
with other players?
We can see that thinking about love as a game poses many problems for
lovers and is most unsatisfactory. And yet, to the extent that we think
metaphorically, the notion that love is a game and many other notions
about the nature of love, are the subject of countless songs and may have
an impact upon impressionable young people—and older ones, as well.
And that is because metaphors have logical implications that often shape
our thinking and behavior. There are many metaphors about love. One
that is interesting to consider, and an activity for students to think about is
“love is a fever.” This is adapted from a line in one of Shakespeare’s
sonnets. If you form your class into small groups of three students and
ask one to be a scribe (to write down the conclusions of the group but also
to participate in analyzing the phrase) it is remarkable what you may
discover.
Love is a Fever
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
CHAPTER 5
Words: Freud on Dreams
Abstract Ideas of James Paul Gee on how we use words and their situated
meanings are dealt with. Oppositional nature of concepts is explained.
Words are shown to be reflections of unconsciously held cultural models
in the way people speak.
Application Work of Sigmund Freud on antithetical terms in dreams is

considered, and his notion that in dreams we represent ideas by their
opposites. Connection between this notion and the defense mechanism
of reaction formation is dealt with.
Keywords Words Situated meanings Oppositions Dreams Reaction

formation
The study of language is all too often restricted to matters of pronunciation,

spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. The methods by
which composition and oratory are taught in old-fashioned school systems
seem to be largely responsible for this widespread notion that the way to
study words is to concentrate exclusively on words.
But as we know from everyday experience, learning language is not
simply a matter of learning words; it is a matter of correctly relating our
words to the things and happenings for which they stand. We learn the
language of baseball by playing or watching the game and studying what goes
on. It is not enough for a child to learn to say “cookie” or “dog”; he must be
able to use these words in their proper relationship to nonverbal cookies and

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_5
nonverbal dogs before we can grant that he is learning the language.

As Wendell Johnson has said, “The study of language begins properly
with a study of what language is about.”
S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action. 4th edition (1978:156)
[Upon Prince Hal telling Falstaff he owes God a death]

Tis not due yet: I would loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so
forward with him that calls not on me? Well, “tis not matter; honor pricks me
on. Yea, but how if honor pricks me off when I come on? How then? Can honor
set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor
hath no skill at surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word
honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that dies a Wednesday. Doth he
feel it? No. Does he hear it? No.” Tis insensible then. Yea, to the dead. But will
[it] not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll
have none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1. Act V, scene 2.
Shakespeare drawing
Falstaff asks “what’s a word?” and concludes it is just a puff of “air.”

Hayakawa points out that language plays an important role in our everyday
lives. He is interested in language both “in thought and in action.” Earlier,
we saw how the language we use can be analyzed to determine—if we look at
the language we use—whether we will be successful in arranging to go out
on a date with someone we met while speed dating. From Saussure we
learned that the meaning of concepts is relational—and I repeat this because
5 WORDS: FREUD ON DREAMS 37
it is so important (1966117) that concepts are defined “not by their positive

content but negatively with their relations with the other terms of the
system.” We can see that a word like “rich” only has meaning because of
its opposite “poor,” but what of a word like hat? The answer is that hat is an
object not a concept.
James Paul Gee, a well-known discourse analyst and the author of a
number of books on the subject, discusses how we use words in his book
An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. He writes about
“situated meanings” (1999:42):
So one important aspect of word meaning is this: we humans recognize certain

patterns in our experience of the world. These patterns (such as “soft,” “thick
laces,” “perhaps with colored trim,” “flexible soles,” “made of certain sorts of
characteristic materials,” “having certain sorts of characteristic looks/designs”,
etc. = athletic shoes) constitute one of the many situated meanings of a word like
“shoe.” . . . There is more to meaning than patterns, children learning the mean-
ing of words cannot stop there. For adults, words involve, in addition to patterns,
a sometimes “rough and ready” explanation of these patterns . . . Why do these
things hang together the way they do (at least for people in our social group)?
Gee then explains that because his theories are based on the practices of
socioculturally defined collections of people, he will use the term cultural
models—which he later casts off in favor of the term “discourse model,”
because the word “culture” is so complicated and calls to mind so many
different things and has so many different meanings.
He concludes this section of the book as follows (1999:44):
So, in addition to situated meanings, each word is associated with a cultural

model. A cultural model is usually a totally or partially unconscious expla-
natory theory or “storyline” connected to a word—bits and pieces of which
are distributed across different people in a social group—that helps to
explain why the word has the different situated meanings and possibilities
for the specific social and cultural groups of people that is has.
Words, then, have complicated lives, being based upon situated meanings
and unconsciously held cultural models by certain social groups that
determine the way we think about words and the way we use them. To a
considerable degree, then, the words we use (that is, our discourse) are
connected to the social groups and subcultures to which we belong.
Dream of Love drawing
APPLICATIONS: FREUD ON ANTITHETICAL TERMS IN DREAMS

Sigmund Freud discusses words (and the work of Karl Abel) in his essay
“The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words.” [A Review of a Pamphlet by
Karl Abel. Uber den Gegensinn der Urworte, 1884. In S. Freud, Character
and Culture. Philip Rieff, ed. Collier Books, New York: 1963a.] He
writes:
In my Traumdeutung I made a statement concerning one of the findings of

my analytic work which I did not then understand. I will repeat it at the
beginning of this review:
“The attitude of dreams towards the category of antithesis and contra-
diction is most striking. This category is simply ignored; the work ‘No’
does not seem to exist for a dream. Dreams show a special tendency to
reduce two opposites to a unity or to represent them as one thing. Dreams
even take the liberty, moreover, of representing any one element whatever
5 WORDS: FREUD ON DREAMS 39
by the opposite wish, so that it is at first impossible to ascertain, in regard

to any element capable of an opposite, whether it is to be taken negatively
or positively in the dream-thoughts.”
To the chance reading of a work by the philologist K. Abel I owe my first
understanding of the strange tendency of the dream-work to disregard nega-
tion and to express contraries by identical means of representation . . . Abel
continues: “Now in the Egyptian language, this unique relic of a primitive
world, we find a fair number of words with two meanings, one of which says
the exact opposite of the other.”
The riddle is more easily solved than appears. Our conceptions always
arise through comparison. “Were it always light we should not distinguish
between light and dark, and accordingly could not have either the concep-
tion of, nor the world for, light. . . . ” “It is clear that everything on this planet
is relative and has independent existence only in so far as it is distinguished in
its relations to and from other things.”
Freud explains that in dreams we represent ideas by their opposites,

which calls to mind his theory about a defense mechanism he called
“reaction formation.” This theory states that we often express one feel-
ing, such as hate, by adopting its opposite feeling, love. This happens,
generally when we have ambivalent attitudes toward someone; we sup-
press one side of our feelings and express the opposite one. It is possible,
then, to act loving toward someone we hate and hateful toward someone
we love.
Freud is fascinated by the role that language plays in our thinking and
our dreaming, and the role that comparisons play in the way we make
sense of the world. Abel’s statement, “Our conceptions always arise
through comparisons,” a statement very similar, in nature, to Saussure’s
idea that “in language there are only differences” (1966:120, originally
published in 1815). It is remarkable that both Freud and Saussure, writing
about the same time, have the same notion of the importance of language
and of comparisons and differences within language. When Freud writes
that “everything on this planet is relative and has independent existence
only in so far as it is distinguished in its relations to and from other
things,” he is restating, in his own words, one of the basic notions of
semiotics, as explained by Saussure and of discourse analysis. Van Dijk
argues that semiotics is a part of discourse analysis and we must remember
that Saussure was a professor of linguistics. As Saussure reminds us, “Signs
function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative
position” (1966:118).
The reason we see things in terms of their opposites, then, is built into
the nature of language. And when we watch dramatic television shows and
movies, we automatically see characters in terms of whether they are
heroes or villains, sympathetic or hateful, and so on. How we interpret
texts is a matter I will have more to say on in this book.
CHAPTER 6
Images: Advertising
Abstract Amount of time adults in America spend watching media on

screens is considered. Definitions of image are offered and role of images in
visual culture of modern life is explained. Amount of information received
from eyes and amount of energy devoted to processing visual information is
described. Work of Robert E. Orenstein is analyzed. New developments in
discourse analysis are explained.
Application Amount of advertising to which Americans and others are

exposed to is shown. List of topics to consider in analyzing advertisements
is offered.
Keywords Image Visual culture Advertising
The fovea is a small circular pit in the center of the retina containing
roughly 25,000 closely packed color-sensitive cones, each with its own
nerve fiber. The fovea contains cells at the unbelievable concentration of
160,000 cells per square millimeter (an area the size of the heat of a pin).
The fovea enables the average person to see most sharply a small circle
ranging in size from 1/96 of an inch to ¼ of an inch (estimates differ) at
the distance of twelve inches from the eye . . . In man, needle-threading,
removal of splinters, and engraving are some of the many activities made
possible by foveal vision . . .
Surrounding the fovea is the macula, an oval yellow body of color-
sensitive cells. It covers a visual angle of three degrees in the vertical plane

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_6
and 12 to 15 degrees in the horizontal plane. Macular vision is quite clear,

but not as clear or sharp as foveal vision because the cells are not as closely
packed as they are in the fovea. Among other things man uses the macular
for reading.
The man who detects movement out of the corner of his eye is seeing
peripherally. Moving away from the central portion of the retina, the char-
acter and quality of vision change radically. The ability to see color
diminishes as the color sensitive cones become more scattered.
Edward Hall, The Hidden Dimension
According to one recent estimate, the retina contains 100 million nerve cells
capable of about 10 billion processing operations per second. The hyper-
stimulus of modern visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present
day has been dedicated to trying to saturate the visual field, a process that
continually fails as we learn to see and connect ever faster.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture
Desert Scene in Egypt. Photo by Arthur Asa Berger

6 IMAGES: ADVERTISING 43
It turns out that the average adult in the United States spends around eight
hours a day looking at screens, and what they see on those screens are
images. But what exactly is an image? If you look in a dictionary you will
find half a dozen different definitions of images, which deal with different
kinds of images or ways we connect with images. One of the best defini-
tions of images, per se, is found in John Morgan and Peter Welton’s See
What I Mean: An Introduction to Visual Communication, in which the
authors write (1986:90) “An image has been defined as the result of
endowing optical sensations with meaning.” I can remember when my
daughter was very young, a large plane passed overhead. “Look at the
airplane,” I said. She looked but since she didn’t know what airplanes
looked like, it didn’t register with her.
Nicholas Mirzoeff offers a discussion of images and visual culture in his
book An Introduction to Visual Culture. He writes (1999:1):
Modern Life takes place onscreen. Life in industrialized countries is increas-

ingly lived under constant video surveillance from cameras in buses and
shopping malls, on highways and bridges, and next to ATM cash
machines . . . For most people, life in the United States is mediated through
television and, to a lesser extent, film. The average American 18 year old sees
only eight movies a year but watches four hours of television a day. These
forms of visualization are now being challenged by interactive visual media
like the Internet and virtual reality applications.
To these figures one must add time spent texting and watching things on
mobiles, and time spent working at computers. We swim, like fish, in a sea
of images.
As far as seeing images are concerned, human beings are like gigantic
supercomputers, with the ability to process enormous numbers of inputs
with remarkable speed. Edward Hall also deals with seeing in his book The
Hidden Dimension where he discusses the fovea and its relation to the
macula. Each area of the eye performs different functions which enables us
to see in different ways, but they blend together and normally aren’t
differentiated. Donis A. Dondis explains how much work we do when
we look at an image. She writes in A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973:17):
When we see, we are doing many things at once. We are seeing an enormous
field peripherally. We are seeing in an up-to-down, left-to-right movement.
We are imposing on what we are isolating in our field of vision not only
implied axes to adjust balance but also a structural map to chart and measure
the action of the compositional forces that are so vital to content and
therefore, to message input and output. All of this is happening while at
the same time we are decoding all manner of symbols.
What we learn from investigating visual perception and communication is

that it takes a lot of work to just see images, let alone figure out what they
mean.
Jarice Hansen explains why our eyes have to work so hard in Under-
standing Video (1987:39):
It is estimated that 75 percent of the information in the brain is from the

eyes, and that 38 percent of the fibers entering or leaving the central nervous
system are in the optic nerve. Current research indicates that the eyes have
100 million sensors in the retina, but only five million channels to the brain
from the retina. This means that more information processing is actually
done in the eye than in the brain, and even the eye filters out information.
This means we have to allocate a good deal of energy to processing visual

information. When we look at an image our eyes are continually scanning
it, as psychologist Robert E. Orenstein explains in The Psychology of
Consciousness. As he writes (1972:27)
Our eyes are constantly in motion, in large eye movements (saccades) as

well as in eye tremors (nystagmus). We blink our eyes every second, move
our eyes around, move our heads and bodies and follow moving objects. . . .
If we “saw” an image on our retina, the visual world would be different
every second, sometime one object, then another, sometimes a blur due to
the eyes moving, sometimes darkness due to blinks. We must then construct
a personal consciousness from the selected input, and in this way achieve
some stability of awareness out of the rich and continually changing flow of
information reaching our receptors.
What we do, Orenstein suggests, is select from all of the information our
eyes can take in and, in a sense, construct the world we see. Seeing is an
active process in which we focus our attention on certain things and are
inattentive to others.
Understanding what images mean and how they generate meaning is
now of considerable interest to scholars working in multimodal critical
discourse analysis (MCDA). In its earliest years, as I pointed out earlier,
the focus was on language, but now discourse analysts have become
“multimodal” and want to know how meaning is generated in sites like

Facebook, which is full of images (around seventy-five percent) as well as
written text and videos. As Machin and Mayr write in How to Do Critical
Discourse Analysis (2012:6):
In the late 1980s and 1990s a number of authors who had been working in
linguistics began to realize that meaning is generally communicated not only
through language but also through other semiotic modes. A linguist might,
for example, be able to provide a thorough and revealing analysis of the
language used in an advertisement. But much of the meaning of this adver-
tisement might be communicated by visual features. The same would apply
to a news text that was accompanied by a photograph or a textbook where
an exercise was part linguistic and part visual.
What is important for multimodal critical discourse analysts, scholars, and

researchers to recognize is the fact that images have both explicit and
implicit ideological significance and can function as agents of persuasion
and cultural domination. The ideological aspects of written and visual texts
generally are not recognized by most people. That is because for most
people recognizing what an image conveys is as far as they go. They
function at the denotation level and pay little attention to the connotations
of the images they see.
We can interrogate images on a number of different levels. Let us take,
for example, a frame from a comic strip. We can makes sense of the last
frame as follows:
The Literal Level. This involves what we see in an image.

The Linguistic Level This focuses on language in the frame.
The Textual Level. This focuses on where the image/frame is in the text.
The Intertextual Level This looks for relations between this image and other images.
The Mythic Level This connects the image to important myths, legends, etc.
The Ideological Level This looks for unrecognized ideological aspects of the image.
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1911–1944, when Herriman died) is

considered by scholars who work with comics to be the greatest
American comic strip. There is good reason to believe that Herriman was
an African-American, though he did not identify himself as such. Given the
times in which he lived, Herriman’s reticence to identify himself as a black
man is understandable.
In the strip, Ignatz Mouse spent forty years figuring out ways to bounce
a brick off of Krazy’s head (she—but we can’t be sure Krazy is a female—
took it as a sign of love) and Offissa Pupp spent forty years trying to
protect Krazy, generally with little success. Herriman was very economical
in the use of language. In one strip he uses only a half a dozen words to tell
its story. We can also read Krazy Kat as having something to say, at the
ideological level, about resistance to authority and power.
With these notions about levels at which we can interrogate images,
it is possible to find things in images we never noticed or thought about
before. Images always tell a story and in advertising, the subject I will
deal with next, that story is more complicated than we might imagine.
APPLICATION: ADVERTISING
If we watch four hours of television a day, we see around an hour of television
commercials. To this we must add all the advertisements we see in news-
papers and magazines, on billboards, on buses and now, on the screens of
our smartphones. According to eMarketer which studies advertising expen-
ditures, the global expenditures on advertising will be 542 billion dollars in
2016. According to eMarketer, America accounts for about 35 percent of all
money spent on advertising and will do so for a number of years. So America,
a country with 330 million people, spends 35 percent and the rest of the
world, about six billion people, spend the rest of the money.
United States The World
330 million 6 Billion

35% 65%
What these figures demonstrate is that Americans are exposed to much

more advertising than everyone else. If you add Asia-Pacific and Europe
you get around 40 percent and the rest of the world has relatively little
advertising. When you multiply 330 million people by twenty, you get
around six billion. This means that Americans watch around twenty times
more advertising than the rest of the world, though people in Asia and
Europe see a good deal of advertising. The figures for global expenditures
on advertising are shown in the table below, from eMarketer.
Total Media Ad Spending Worldwide, by Region,

2014-2020
billions and % change
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Total media ad spending (billions)
North $184.95 $192.81 $202.38 $212.00 $223.20 $234.48 $245.93
America
Asia-Pacific $147.34 $158.30 $171.51 $185.78 $202.61 $219.39 $235.48
Western $93.23 $95.44 $97.88 $100.22 $102.56 $104.80 $106.99
Europe
Latin America $28.81 $31.02 $34.02 $37.06 $39.41 $41.14 $42.54
Middle East & $20.62 $21.85 $23.10 $24.25 $25.35 $26.44 $27.49
Africa
Central & $13.53 $13.65 $13.67 $14.04 $14.57 $15.22 $15.81
Eastern Europe
Worldwide $488.48 $513.07 $542.55 $573.36 $607.70 $641.47 $674.24
Total media ad spending growth (% change)
Latin America 12.6 % 7.7 % 9.7 % 8.9 % 6.3 % 4.4% 3.4%
Asia-Pacific 9.5 % 7.4 % 8.3 % 8.3 % 9.1 % 8.3% 7.3%
Middle East & 6.9 % 6.0 % 5.7 % 5.0 % 4.5 % 4.3% 4.0%
Africa
North America 3.3 % 4.3 % 5.0 % 4.8 % 5.3 % 5.1% 4.9%
Western Europe 2.2 % 2.4 % 2.6 % 2.4 % 2.3 % 2.2% 2.1%
Central & 7.4 % 0.9 % 0.2 % 2.7 % 3.7 % 4.5% 3.8%
Eastern Europe
Worldwide 5.7% 5.0% 5.7% 5.7% 6.0% 5.6% 5.1%
Note: includes digital (desktop/laptop, mobile and other internet-connected
devices), directories, magazines, newspapers, out-of-home, radio and TV
Source: eMarketer, March 2016
206069 www.eMarketer.com
eMarketer Chart
In writing about advertising, then, I am dealing with a very powerful

influence on individuals and on society. Advertising not only helps us choose
brands of shoes and handbags and toothpaste, but also congressmen, sena-
tors, and presidents. It is the engine on contemporary consumer cultures
and, as such, of great interest to scholars in many disciplines.
In this chapter I will suggest ways to analyze a magazine advertisement
to see what it reflects about American culture and society. The question
you must always ask yourself when interrogating an image that is of major
importance is, is it actually found in the image or are you reading some-
thing into it? One thing that complicates analyzing some advertisements is
that advertisements, like other kinds of texts, often have intertextual
borrowings.
Analyzing Advertisements
Let me suggest some topics to consider when analyzing a print advertise-
ment that has copy (textual material) and people in it. This list draws upon,
but is amplified, from one I made in my book Ads, Fads and Consumer
Culture 5th edition, which has my analysis of a number of print advertise-
ments and the famous “1984” Macintosh commercial in it.
1. What is the design of the advertisement? Do we find axial balance

or an asymmetrical relationship among the elements in the
advertisement?
2. How much written material is there relative to the amount of
pictorial matter? Is this relationship significant in any respect?
3. Is there a great deal of blank (white) space in the advertisement or is it
full of graphic and textual material? There is often a correlation
between upscale products and white or empty space in advertisements.
4. If there is a photograph in the advertisement, what angle is the
photograph shot at? Do we look up at the people in the advertise-
ment, which makes them superior? Do we look down at them,
which makes us seem superior? Or do we look at them from a
shoulder-level position? What significance does the angle of the
shot have?
5. How is the photograph lit? Is there a great deal of light or is there
a little light and very dark shadows (chiaroscuro lighting)? What
is the mood found in the advertisement? What role does the mood
or tone of the advertisement play in convincing people to purchase
the product or service?
6. If the photograph in the advertisement is in color, what colors
dominate? What significance do these colors have?
7. How would you describe figures in the advertisement? Consider
such matters as facial expression, hair color, hair length, hair sty-
ling, fashions (clothes, shoes, eyeglass design, and jewelry), various
props (a cane, an umbrella), body shape, body language, age,
gender, race, ethnicity, signs of occupation, signs of educational
level, relationships suggested between the males and females,
objects in the background, and so on.
8. What is happening in the advertisement? What does the “action” in
the photo suggest? Assume that we are seeing one moment in an
ongoing narrative. Imagine what this narrative is. What does it
reveal about the figures?
9. What signs or symbols are in the photograph? What signifiers and
signifieds do you find? What symbols? What role do these signs and
symbols play?
10. In the textual material, how is language used? What arguments
are made or implied about the people in the photograph and
about the product being advertised? That is, what rhetorical
devices are used to attract readers and stimulate desire in
them for the product or service? Does the advertisement use
metonyms/associations and/or metaphors/analogies or other
techniques to make its point?
11. What typefaces are used in the textual parts of the advertisement?
What importance do the various typefaces have? (Why these type-
faces and not other ones?)
12. What are the basic “themes” in the advertisement? How do these
themes relate to the story implied by the advertisement?
13. What product or service is being advertised? Who is the target
audience for this product or service? What role does this product
or service play in American culture and society?
14. What values and beliefs are reflected in the advertisement? Sexual
jealousy? Patriotism? Motherly love? Brotherhood of man?
Success? Power? Good taste? Show how these values are tied to
the images and language found in the text.
15. Is there any background information you need to make sense of

the advertisement? How does American culture (or some other
culture) shape our understanding of the advertisement? Are there
intertextual borrowings you can find?
You have to place advertisements in the context of American society and

consider what they reflect about the audiences to which the advertise-
ments are directed and American character and culture.
CHAPTER 7
Signs: Fashion
Abstract Basic concepts of semiotics are offered, including works of

Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles S. Peirce, and Umberto Eco. Definition
of sign is offered, and arbitrary nature of relation between elements of
signs, signifiers, and signifieds is considered. Difference between connota-
tion and denotation, and relation between semiotics and discourse analysis
are explained.
Application Works by sociologist Georg Simmel, cultural analyst Ruth

P. Rubinstein, and sociologist Orrin Klapp on fashion are dealt with.
Semiotic aspects of fashion and relation between fashion and ideology
are investigated.
Keywords Semiotics Signs Signifiers Signifieds Fashion Ideology
I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current

usage the term generally designates only a sound-image, a word, for
example . . . I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the
whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified
[signifie] and signifier [signifiant]; the last two terms have the advantage
of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from
the whole of which they are parts. As regards sign, if I am satisfied with it,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_7
this is simply because I do not know of any word to replace it, the ordinary
language suggesting no other.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915/1966:67)
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is

everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something
else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or actually be
somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it. Thus semiotics is in
principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.
If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used “to
tell” at all.
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (1976:7)
Every sign is determined by its objects, either first by partaking in the

characters of the object, when I call a sign an Icon; secondly, by being
really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object,
when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by more or less approximate
certainty that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in conse-
quence of a habit (which term I use as including a natural disposition),
when I call the sign a Symbol.
Charles S. Peirce (quoted by J.J. Zeman in Thomas Sebeok, Ed.
A Perfusion of Signs 1977:36)
Semiotics is the “science of signs,” a sign being, as Umberto Eco, a well-

known semiotician and novelist explains, anything that can be used to
stand for something else, whether that something else actually exists or
not. Words are signs and for discourse analysts, one of the most important
kind of signs. Eco also argues that signs can lie and if they can’t be used to
lie, they can’t be used to communicate at all.
The term “semiotics” comes from the Greek word sēmeîon, which
means “signs.” Earlier, I discussed the work of de Saussure, whose book
A Course in General Linguistics was published in 1915. It was translated
into English in 1966. The other founding father of semiotics, Peirce,
argued that a sign is “something which stands to somebody for something
in some respect or capacity” (quoted in Zeman, 1977:27), which means
that people play a major role in understanding signs.
Saussure’s division of signs into sound-images or signifiers and concepts
or signified is at the heart of his approach to semiotics. Peirce’s trichotomy
of iconic (signify by resemblance, as for example, a photograph of a person
and that person), indexical (signify by association, as for example, smoke,
7 SIGNS: FASHION 53
and fire), and symbolic (signify by being taught what is signified, for
example a flag or a crucifix) is at the heart of his approach.
Saussure offered a charter statement about semiology/semiotics in his
book. He wrote (1915/1966:16):
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable

to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite
formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these
systems.
A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would
be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology;
I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeîon “sign”). Semiology would
show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science
does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to
existence, a place staked out in advance.
This is the charter statement of semiotics, a statement that opens the study
of discourse of all kinds to us. Not only can we study symbolic rites and
military signals, we can also study conversations, speeches, articles in
newspapers and magazines, radio and television commercials, soap operas,
situation comedies, and almost anything else as “sign systems.”
It is important that we realize that the relationship between the two
components of signs, signifiers and signifieds, is arbitrary and based on
convention. This means that meaning of signs can change. For example,
fifty years ago or so long hair in men was associated with being artistic.
Now, so many men have long hair that it has lost its meaning. Hair length
along with hair color and hair styling are signs and we have to learn how to
interpret them and all kinds of other signs. Thus, for example, many blond
women (and now men) dye their hair blond. And that beautiful blond
woman you see, on the other side of a room you are in, may actually be a
cross-dressing man, who is “lying” about his gender by appropriating the
signs of femininity for his purposes and needs.
Linguists make a distinction between connotation and denotation.
Connotation refers to the cultural meanings that become attached to
words in discourse and historic and symbolic meanings connected to them.
Denotation refers to the explicit or literal meaning of words in discourse and
other matters connected to them. Thus, the denotations of Barbie Dolls are
that it was a toy designed for girls that was 11.5 inches high, had measure-
ments of 5.25 inches at the bust, 3.0 inches at the waist, and 4.25 inches at
the hips (for the original 1959 version). The connotations of Barbie Doll are
open to discussion. For some theorists, Barbie Doll marks a change in the
way girls were socialized. Instead of rehearsing for motherhood with baby
dolls, little girls learned to be courtesans and consumers, since Barbie Doll
buys lots of clothes and has relationships with Ken dolls. In 2016, Mattel
introduced a number of different Barbie Dolls with different body shapes
and ethnicities, a sign that American culture is changing.
Discourse analysis, in conjunction with semiotics, psychoanalytic theory
and Marxist ideological theory is now an important part of cultural studies.
Because of the focus semiotics has on signs, it is used in multimodal discourse
analysis—since images, videos, and language are all now very important and
play a major role in social media such as Facebook. Discourse analysis in
Drawing of Levi’s Patch

7 SIGNS: FASHION 55
conjunction with semiotics is interested in everything—in imaginary signs

(in our dreams), in the manifest and latent meaning of signs, in signs and
lifestyles, in the role signs play in our constructing our identities, with signs
that confound (optical illusions), with no sign as a sign (the dog that didn’t
bark in a Sherlock Holmes mystery), and with just anything else in which
meaning plays an important role. Roland Barthes used semiotics to explain
the important of professional wrestling to the French and other aspects of
French culture such as “steak and frites,” margarine and detergents. This
explains why semiotics plays such an important role in discourse analysis.
Semioticians are imperialistic academics and tend to see everything as a
subdiscipline of semiotics, including discourse theory. Discourse theorists
are also imperialistic and see everything else (including semiotics) as part of
discourse theory. That explains why we find a chapter on semiotics in van
Dijk’s edited book Discourse as Structure and Process.
APPLICATION: FASHION
Whatever else fashion may be, it uses articles of clothing, jewelry, watches,
accessories, and other things as signs—indicating who we are or who we
think we are. (A woman in a typical Neiman Marcus advertisement is very
beautiful, has lots of jewelry and is very upscale fashionable.) Or who we
want others to think we are. Or who we want to be. Fashion is of interest to
social scientists and qualitative researchers like discourse analysts because it is
a form of collective behavior and has certain imperatives connected to it. The
term “fashion” is derived from the Latin term “faction,” which can mean
either “to make or do” or “faction.” Faction suggests differentiation which is
one of the major components of fashion. The language in fashion ads—what
little there is, most of the time—is also of interest to discourse analysts.
Fashion ads, which often combine words and images, require a multimodal
discourse analysis approach.
Susan Kaiser, Howard G. Schutz, and Joan L. Chandler offer an insight
into the relation between fashion and ideology in their article “Cultural
Codes and Sex-Role Ideology: A Study of Shoes.” They write (in The
American Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1987:14):
In recent years, scholars in a variety of areas of study (cultural studies,

semiotics, sociology, textiles and clothing, to mention a few) have pursued
the study of mundane objects that emerge as representative codes of everyday
culture. These objects take on a symbolic dimension, connoting not only
style-specificity to a particular social group but also . . . social-political ideology.

Hebdige (1979:13) has noted that ideology often thrives beneath the social
consciousness, and the “perceived-accepted-suffered” nature of cultural objects
provides a means for detangling the underlying power structure of society.
The term fashion can be used for various products but it is generally used
to deal with different styles of clothes and accessories which become
popular for a time and then become superseded by the next style.
Georg Simmel drawing
Georg Simmel, a German sociologist (1858–1918), had some perceptive

things to say about fashion in his article “The Philosophy of Fashion.” He
writes in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (Eds.), Simmel on Culture
(1997:192):
The essence of fashion consists of the fact that it should always be

exercised by only part of a given group, the great majority of whom are
merely on the road to adopting it. As soon as fashion has been universally
adopted, that is, as soon as anything that was originally done only by a
7 SIGNS: FASHION 57
few has really come to be practiced by all—as is the case in certain

elements of clothing and various forms of social conduct—we no longer
characterize it as fashion. Every growth of fashion drives it to its doom,
because it thereby cancels out its distinctiveness . . . Fashion’s question is
not that of being, but rather it is simultaneously being and non-being; it
always stands on the watershed of the past and the future and, as a result,
conveys to us, at least while it is at its height, a stronger sense of the
present than do most other phenomena.
His point is that fashion is always in a state of being born, but once it is
accepted by large numbers of people, it loses its power to differentiate
fashionable people from others, and must be replaced, so it is continually
being born and dying. People who are not fashionable adopt the latest
fashions because they approve of them and are envious of those who are
fashionable.
From a semiotic perspective, clothes and other objects subject to fash-
ion are signs that convey information about the people who are fashion-
able. In Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture, Ruth P.
Rubinstein writes (1995:3):
Most social scientists take it for granted that an individual’s clothing

expresses meaning. They accept the old saw that “a picture is worth a
thousand words” and generally concede that dress and ornament are ele-
ments in a communication system. They recognize that a person’s attire can
indicate either conformity or resistance to socially defined expectations for
behavior. Yet few scholars have attempted to explain the meaning and
relevance of clothing systematically. They often mistake it for fashion (in a
person’s desired appearance) whereas clothing refers to established patterns
of dress. As a result, neither clothing images nor the rules that govern their
use have been adequately identified or explained.
We see fashion as messages in the dress styles of adolescents and young

adults, to whom fashion is a way of communicating messages to those who
know how to decode them. We can say the same thing to gay and lesbian
clothing styles, cross-dressers, surfers, bikers, orthodox Jews, members of
youth gangs, and so on. Fashion in clothing, in jewelry, in handbags and
briefcases, and other objects subject to fashion becomes a means of
asserting one’s identity.
Simmel offers us an insight into why so many people follow or adopt

fashions so slavishly. It is, he suggests, because of their weak social posi-
tion. As he explains (1997:196):
If fashion both gives expression towards the impulse towards equalization

and individualization, as well as to the allure of imitation and conspicuous-
ness, this perhaps explains why it is that women, broadly speaking, adhere
especially strongly to fashion. Out of the weakness of their social position to
which were condemned throughout the greater part of history there arises
there close relationship to all that is “custom,” to that which is “right and
proper,” to the generally valid and approved form of existence. Those who
are weak steer clear of individualization; they avoid dependence upon the
self, with its responsibilities and the necessity of defending oneself unaided.
Following fashions enables people to disappear into the crowd and avoid
people’s attention. We can see those who are slaves to fashion as a signifier
of a sense of weakness and an unwillingness to stand out. There are others,
of course, who want to stand out—what Orrin Klapp calls “ego screamers,”
who use fashion to draw attention to themselves. He discusses a number of
matters relative to fashion in his The Collective Search for Identity
(1969:75):
1. the sheer variety of “looks” (types) available to the common man;

2. the explicitness of identity search (for the real you);
3. ego-screaming: the plea “look at me!”;
4. style rebellion (style uses as a means of protest or defiance);
5. theatricalism and masquerading on the street;
6. pose as a way of getting to the social position one wants;
7. dandyism: (living for style, turning away from the Horatio Alger
model of success);
8. dandyism of the common man as well as the aristocrat;
9. pronounced escapism in many styles (such as those of beatniks,
hippies, surfers . . . );
10. a new concept of the right to be whatever one pleases, regardless of
what others think (the new romanticism);
11. the breakdown of status symbols, the tendency of fashions to mix
and obscure classes rather than differentiate them.
7 SIGNS: FASHION 59
The existence of many “knock-offs” helps obscure class relations as shown

by branding and fashion, in general. And some people who opt out of the
imperatives of fashion prevent us from always making a connection
between fashion, high-status brands, and social identity.
We can think of brands, from a discourse analysis perspective, as
iconic signifiers. Brands often identify themselves by icons, which
show that people wearing a particular brand of object—eyeglasses,
purses, etc.—can afford the item and can differentiate themselves from
people who wear less expensive brands or no brand (commodity) fash-
ion items. And by the language they use, which helps distinguish the
fashion item from others and the brand from others. What brands try to
do is differentiate themselves from other brands and from generic
products. Brands use advertising to tell stories—to establish an image
about the kind of people who use their products. From a Saussurean
perspective we can say “in brands, there are only differences.” Brands
primarily compete with one another but also with generic no-brand
products or commodities.
Laura R. Oswald, in her article “Semiotics and Strategic Brand
Management,” discusses the role of semiotics in creating brands (http://
www.media.illinois.edu/advertisng/semiotics_oswald.pdf). She writes:
Over the past ten years or so, brand strategy researchers have come to
recognize the importance of brand communication in building and sustain-
ing brand equity, the value attached to a brand name or log that supersedes
product attributes and differentiates brands in the competitive arena . . . The
contribution of brand meanings and perceptions to profitability—the Coca
Cola brand is valued at over $70 billion—testifies to the power of symbolic
representation to capture the hearts and minds of consumers by means of
visual, audio, and verbal signs. The semiotic—or symbolic—dimension of
brands is therefore instrumental for building awareness, positive associa-
tions, and long-term customer loyalty, and contributes to trademark own-
ership and operational advantages such as channel and media clout.
Consequently, managing brand equity means managing brand semiotics.
It is discourse analysis and semiotics that enable us to understand what

brands are, how brands work, and the role brand language plays in con-
sumer decision making.
We might ask the following questions when studying the language in

fashion advertisements:
What words were used? If no words are used, why?

Are there any metaphors and similes in the text? (analogies)
Are there any metonymies and synecdoches? (associations)
What affirmations are made and negations stated?
What is the tone of the language used? Why was this tone adopted?
What logical arguments and emotional appeals are made?
What slogans are used? How are headlines used?
What questions are asked and answered in the textual material?
What is the style of the language used? What was this style used?
Where can one by the products being sold? Do they cities where they
are sold tell us anything?
We have to recognize that the language used in ads for upscale fashion
products is different from that used in advertisements for inexpensive
ones.
What’s important about brand-name products is that when we see a
person wearing a certain brand or collection of brands, we get, we believe,
a sense of what the person using the brands is like—if, that is, we have seen
advertisements for the brand and know something about it. Branded
luxury objects are status symbols and help confer high status upon those
who use them. If a self is a kind of conversation we have with ourselves,
what happens when we get tired of certain brands and switch to others? Is
there a kind of dissociation that occurs as we take on a new self based on
new brands that we now find attractive? That is a problem we all have to
wrestle with—if that is, we use brand products and feel strongly about the
brands we use.
PART II
Texts
CHAPTER 8
Narratives: Fairy Tales
Abstract Ideas of Michel de Certeau and Seymour Chatman on narratives

are explored. Narratives are suggested to be one of the most important
ways we learn about the world, along with the logico-scientific mode.
Ideas of Aristotle on narratives are considered along with his notion that
art is based on imitation and his ideas about the nature of plot. M. M.
Bakhtin’s theories about intertextuality are explored.
Application Theories by Bruno Bettelheim about importance of fairy

tales to children’s development are explained, and basic elements of fairy
tales are listed. Readers are asked to do a discourse analysis of a fairy tale,
“Little Red Cap” (aka “Little Red Riding Hood”) focusing on the lan-
guage and dialogue in the story.
Keywords Narratives Logico-scientific mode Aristotle Fairy tales
Captured by the radio (the voice is the law) as soon as he awakens, the
listener walks all day long through the forest of narrativities from journal-
ism, advertising, and television narrativities that still find time, as he is
getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of
sleep. Even more than the God told about by the theologians of earlier
days, these stories have a providential and predestining function: they
organize in advance our work, our celebrations, and even our dreams.
Social life multiplies the gestures and modes of behavior (im)printed by

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_8
narrative models; it ceasely [sic] reproduces and accumulates “copies” of

stories. Our society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is
defined by stories (recits, the fables constituted by our advertising and
informational media), by citations of stories, and by the interminable
recitation of stories. These narrations have the twofold and strange
power of transforming seeing into believing, and of fabricating realities
out of appearances.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, (1984:186)
Narrative discourse consists of a connected sequence of narrative statements,

where “statement” is quite independent of the particular expressive
medium . . . What is communicated is story, the formal content element of
narrative, and it communicated by discourse, the formal expression element.
The discourse is said to “state” the story, and these statements are of two kinds:
process and stasis—according to whether someone did something or something
happened; or whether something simply existed in the story . . . Process state-
ments are in the mode of DO or HAPPEN . . . Stasis statements are in the
mode of IS. A text that consisted entirely of stasis statements, that is, stated
only the existence of a set of things, could only imply a narrative. Events are
either logically essential, or not (“kernels” versus “satellites”).
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse. (1978:31–32)
Michel de Certeau
8 NARRATIVES: FAIRY TALES 65
As Michel de Certeau, an important French media theorist, points out in the

epigraph, our societies are pervaded by narratives and these narratives play a
role in shaping the way we think and live. If we spend around two hours a day
listening to the radio and five hours a day in the United States watching
television, that means we are exposed to countless micro-narratives (in
commercials) and regular narratives (in news shows, dramas, crime shows,
etc.). These narratives are mostly based on scripts and have a considerable
amount of dialogue in them—dialogue that we can use in our research.
Chatman, the linguistics professor from the University of California in
Berkeley whose ideas I discussed earlier, offers us insights into the structure
of narratives. He explains that there are two kinds of events in narratives:
logically essential events, which he calls “kernels” and events that are not
essential for the narrative, which he calls “satellites.” In analyzing narratives,
it is useful to determine whether events are basic to the narrative line or of
secondary importance and focus one’s attention on the kernels.
Narratives are of interest to discourse analysts because much of the work
they do deals with sequential communication of one kind or another, such as
clauses, sentences, paragraphs, conversations, and so on, up the ladder to
literary and sub-literary texts. Sometimes narratives have a narrator, who
helps tell the story, but often the characters in stories, through their dialogue
and actions, act out the story. We find narratives in conversations, in jokes, in
dreams, in fairy tales, in myths, in comic strips and graphic novels, in songs,
in plays, in novels, and any kind of text that is sequential in nature.
Discourse theorists argue that the language we use in our conversations,
and to which we are exposed in the media, plays an important role in the way
we relate to others and even in how we achieve an identity. But narratives
cover more territory than conversations, speech, and stories, for there is a
narrative structure to texts such as news shows and sports contests. Think, for
example, at the tension we find in the last minutes of football games where, if
one team can kick a field goal or score a touchdown, it will win the game.
Laurel Richardson, an American social scientist, explains that narratives
are one of the most important ways we learn about the world and our place
in it. She writes about the significance of narratives in our lives in her essay
“Narrative and Sociology” from the Journal of Contemporary Ethnology
(1990:118):
Narrative is the primary way through which humans organize their experi-
ences into temporally meaningful episodes . . . Narrative is both a mode of
reasoning and a mode of representation. People can “apprehend” the world
narratively and people can “tell” about the world narratively. According to
Jerome Bruner . . . narrative reasoning is one of the two basic and universal
human cognition modes. The other mode is the logico-scientific . . . the
logico-scientific mode looks for universal truth conditions, whereas the
narrative mode looks for particular connections between events.
Explanation in the narrative mode is contextually embedded, whereas the
logico-scientific explanation is extracted from spatial and temporal events.
Both modes are “rational” ways of making meaning.
Narrative, then, plays an important role in the way we learn about the
world, along with the logico-scientific mode, which also uses narratives in
explaining things to people.
Aristotle drawing
Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, had a good deal to say about
narratives in his Poetics, written about 330 B.C. His book deals with
poetry, but he uses the term in a very general sense to talk about literature
and narratives. He begins by suggesting that literary works are imitations
of reality (the mimetic theory of art) and discussed three topics relative to
imitation: first, the medium of imitation (print versus film, for example);
second, the objects imitated (people); and third, the mode of imitation.
He points out that some arts, prose or verse, only use language while
others employ a number of different media. (Think, for example, of the
difference between a novel and a film made from that novel. The novel just
has words, while the film has actors, dialogue, settings, sound, music and
various other things.) Then Aristotle discusses the objects of imitation:
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be
either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to
these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of
moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better
than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.
There are, logically speaking, only three possibilities: we can portray people
as they are, as better than they are or as worse than they are. We must keep
in mind that we are dealing with “men in action” as he puts it—that is,
people doing things. This he describes as Plot.
This is followed by his analysis of his third topic, the manner of imita-
tion. He explains:
. . . the poet may imitate by narration, in which case he can either take
another personality, as Homer does, or speak in his own person,
unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving.
Aristotle has offered us an overview of the nature of literary works and the
way in which they can be structured:
1. we can assume another’s identity, which means one writes in the

third person.
2. we can speak in our own person, which means one writes in the first
person.
3. we can have our characters tell the story by interacting with one another.
It is also possible to mix things up. It is possible to start a novel or a play

with a narrator but move into a situation in which the narrator withdraws
and the characters in the story take over.
Aristotle then differentiates comedy from tragedy. Comedy is:
an imitation of persons inferior—not, however, in the full sense of the word

bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists of
some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive.
Tragedy, on the other hand, “is an imitation of an action that is serious,

complete, and of a certain magnitude.”
Aristotle deals with some of the most important aspects of narrative
theory as it relates to texts—the plot, the characters, and the dialogue
(which is more or less what he meant by diction); but most important of
all, he insists, is the plot—the “the structure of the incidents.” But, he
reminds us, what the characters do is connected to what they are like and
how they think. This explains why in novels and other kinds of narrative
texts we must find out at certain times (via various literary techniques used
by authors) what characters think in addition to following what they say
and what they do. Discourse theorists might argue with Aristotle about
the relationship between dialogue and plot, because discourse theory
suggests that a character’s language reflects his or her personality and it
is the personalities of the characters that shape the dialogue and the plot.
Aristotle believed that tragedy involved an imitation of an action that is
whole, complete, and unified, suggesting that if any one of the compo-
nents of a work is missing, the work will be “disjointed and disturbed.” In
addition, the poet deals not only with what has happened but also with
what may happen, or, as Aristotle puts it, “what is possible according to
the law of probability or necessity.” Since works should have unity,
Aristotle does not like episodic plots, ones in which “episodes or acts
succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence.”
M.M. Bakhtin
His notion that the poet must deal with what has happened and
what may happen is very close to the Russian communication theorist
Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogue and conversation. As Bakhtin explains

in The Dialogic Imagination (1981:280):
The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly oriented toward a

future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it, and structures
itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the
already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has
not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the
answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue.
It is not much of a leap from Bakhtin’s ideas to the concept of intertex-

tuality, which I’ve mentioned in various places in this book.
Aristotle distinguishes between simple plots, which involve changes of
fortune without reversals or recognition by the major characters as to what
has happened and complex plots that involve changes of fortune with
reversals or recognitions, or both. By recognition Aristotle means “a
change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between
the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.” The best tragic
plots have both reversals and recognition and involve changes of fortune
from good too bad that arouse both fear and pity.
This material summarizes the most important points Aristotle makes in
his Poetics about the nature of narratives. We must remember that Aristotle
had tremendous authority and his ideas influenced the thinking of writers
and critics for thousands of years and are still influential, to this day, though
they don’t have the authority they once had. Aristotle’s theories about the
nature of narratives played a role in a famous research project by the linguist
William Labov.
He asked a group of New Yorkers to answer the question, “Were you
ever in a situation where you were in serious danger of being killed?” He
recorded their answers and discovered that some of them had the compo-
nents of Aristotle’s definition of a narrative—that is, they had a beginning,
a middle, and an end. Other answers went beyond that and had the
following components: an abstract (for example, a friend pulled a knife
on me), an orientation (this happened at a New Year’s Eve party), a
complicating action (some friend’s grabbed him), an evaluation (I was
terrified) a resolution (he cooled down), and a coda (we shook hands and
that ended that confrontation). These components are, Labov suggested,
found in most conversations.
APPLICATION: OUR FIRST STORIES—FAIRY TALES

Fairy tales are among the first and, if Bruno Bettelheim is correct, most
important kinds of narratives to which we are exposed when we are
children. As he explains in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairy Tales (1977:25):
In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalized and become compre-

hensible as represented by the figures of the story and its events. This is
the reason why in traditional Hindu medicine a fairy tale giving form to
his particular problem was offered to a psychically disoriented person, for
his meditation. It was expected that through contemplating the story the
disturbed person would be led to visualize both the nature of the
impasses from which he suffered, and the possibility of its resolution.
From what a particular tale implied about man’s despair, hopes, and
methods of overcoming tribulations, the patient could discover not only
a way out of his distress but also a way to find himself, as the hero of the
story did.
What this means is that the narrative elements in fairy tales have a ther-
apeutic function, which helps explain why they have been popular for so
many hundreds—if not thousands—of years.
Fairy tales have certain elements:
1. Usually they begin with a statement like “Once upon a time,” which
sets the narrative in the past and distinguishes it from stories that
take place in the present time.
2. They usually end with a happy resolution as the heroes triumph over
the villains and end with phrases such as “And they all lived happily
ever after.” Bettelheim suggests that this closing brings children
back from the fantasy of the fairy tale to reality.
3. Fairy tales have a simple bi-polar structure, with extremes of good
and evil. Young children find it difficult to deal with shadings of evil
and goodness.
4. The focus in fairy tales is on the actions of the heroes and heroines,
who tend to be young, weak, and ordinary. We generally know them
by their first names, like Jack and Tom and Mary. Children can
identify with such characters easily.
5. In fairy tales, good and evil are present all the time and the differ-
ences between them are sharply drawn, so children don’t have any
difficulty in identifying with the good heroes and heroines and
relishing the defeat of the villains and villainesses. The heroes often
have helpers and magic objects to aid them in their battles with the
evil figures in the fairy tales.
There are often variations in the way fairy tales are told but what is important
is the story—what happens in the tale—not the texts, which may vary in
different minor ways.
Bruno Bettelheim explains that these tales, which were passed down
over the millennia, became increasingly refined and able to communicate
to the uneducated minds of little children. He writes (1977:6):
Applying the psychoanalytic model of the human personality, fairy tales

carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious and the uncon-
scious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time. By dealing
with universal human problems, particularly those which preoccupy the
child’s mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its
development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and uncon-
scious pressures. As the stories unfold, they give conscious credence and
body to id pressures and show ways to satisfy these that are in line with ego
and superego requirements.
Thus, fairy tales play an important role in children’s development and

children who do not read fairy tales do not get the many psychological
benefits these tales confer.
Not only are fairy tales often the first stories young children are told,
fairy tales can be seen as UR-Narratives, by which I mean they contain the
seeds of many genres.
1. They often have dragons and other kinds of monsters which leads to
horror stories.
2. There is often a search for a kidnapped princess or some other kind
of search which leads to detective stories.
3. Often the heroes and sometimes the villains have magic objects,
there may be flying carpets and that kind of thing which leads to
science fiction stories.
4. There are fights with dragons and evil figures which leads to action-
adventure stories.
5. The hero often marries someone he has rescued at the end of the
story which leads to the romance novel.
It is reasonable to suggest, then, that elements of fairy tales can be

extended and form our most important popular culture genres.
Bettelheim mentions in his book that Hindu healers, after they spent time
with their patients and learned about their problems, composed individualized
fairy tales for them, which helped their patients overcome their problems.
APPLICATION: DO A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF LITTLE RED CAP

(AKA AS RED RIDING HOOD)
Using concepts from discourse theory discussed earlier, analyze the lan-
guage and dialogue in this story (from the Brothers Grimm), remember-
ing that is meant for young children. If you are interested in a
psychoanalytic interpretation of this story, you can read Bettelheim’s
discussion of it in The Uses of Enchantment.
Little Red Cap

Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone
who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was
nothing that she would not have given to the child. Once she gave her a
little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear
anything else. So she was always called little red-cap.
One day her mother said to her, come, little red-cap, here is a piece of
cake and a bottle of wine. Take them to your grandmother, she is ill and
weak, and they will do her good. Set out before it gets hot, and when you
are going, walk nicely and quietly and do not run off the path, or you may
fall and break the bottle, and then your grandmother will get nothing.
And when you go into her room, don’t forget to say, good-morning, and
don’t peep into every corner before you do it.
I will take great care, said little red-cap to her mother, and gave her hand
on it. The grandmother lived out in the wood, half a league from the village,
and just as little red-cap entered the wood, a wolf met her. Red-cap did not
know what a wicked creature he was, and was not at all afraid of him.
“Good-day, little red-cap,” said he.

“Thank you kindly, wolf.”.
“Whither away so early, little red-cap?”.
“To my grandmother’s.”.
“What have you got in your apron?”.
“Cake and wine. Yesterday was baking-day, so poor sick grandmother is to

have something good, to make her stronger.”
“Where does your grandmother live, little red-cap?”
“A good quarter of a league farther on in the wood. Her house stands

under the three large oak-trees, the nut-trees are just below. You surely
must know it,” replied little red-cap.
The wolf thought to himself, what a tender young creature. What a nice
plump mouthful, she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must act
craftily, so as to catch both. So he walked for a short time by the side of
little red-cap, and then he said, “see little red-cap, how pretty the flowers
are about here. Why do you not look round. I believe, too, that you do
not hear how sweetly the little birds are singing. You walk gravely along as
if you were going to school, while everything else out here in the wood is
merry.”
Little red-cap raised her eyes, and when she saw the sunbeams
dancing here and there through the trees, and pretty flowers growing
everywhere, she thought, suppose I take grandmother a fresh nosegay.
That would please her too. It is so early in the day that I shall still get
there in good time. And so she ran from the path into the wood to
look for flowers. And whenever she had picked one, she fancied that
she saw a still prettier one farther on, and ran after it, and so got deeper
and deeper into the wood.
Meanwhile the wolf ran straight to the grandmother’s house and
knocked at the door.
“Who is there?”
“Little red-cap,” replied the wolf. “She is bringing cake and wine. Open the
door.”
“Lift the latch,” called out the grandmother, “I am too weak, and cannot
get up.”
The wolf lifted the latch, the door sprang open, and without saying a
word he went straight to the grandmother’s bed, and devoured her. Then
he put on her clothes, dressed himself in her cap, laid himself in bed and
drew the curtains.
Little red-cap, however, had been running about picking flowers, and
when she had gathered so many that she could carry no more, she
remembered her grandmother, and set out on the way to her.
She was surprised to find the cottage-door standing open, and when she
went into the room, she had such a strange feeling that she said to herself, oh
dear, how uneasy I feel to-day, and at other times I like being with grand-
mother so much. She called out, “good morning,” but received no answer.
So she went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grand-
mother with her cap pulled far over her face, and looking very strange.
“Oh, grandmother,” she said, “what big ears you have.”

“The better to hear you with, my child,” was the reply.
“But, grandmother, what big eyes you have,” she said.
“The better to see you with, my dear.”
“But, grandmother, what large hands you have.”
“The better to hug you with.”
“Oh, but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have.”
“The better to eat you with.”
And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was out of
bed and swallowed up red-cap.
When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in the bed,
fell asleep and began to snore very loud. The huntsman was just passing the
house, and thought to himself, how the old woman is snoring. I must just
see if she wants anything. So he went into the room, and when he came to
the bed, he saw that the wolf was lying in it. Do I find you here, you old
sinner, said he. I have long sought you. Then just as he was going to fire at
him, it occurred to him that the wolf might have devoured the grand-
mother, and that she might still be saved, so he did not fire, but took a pair
of scissors, and began to cut open the stomach of the sleeping wolf. When
he had made two snips, he saw the little red-cap shining, and then he made
two snips more, and the little girl sprang out, crying, ah, how frightened
I have been. How dark it was inside the wolf. And after that the aged
grandmother came out alive also, but scarcely able to breathe. Red-cap,
however, quickly fetched great stones with which they filled the wolf’s belly,
and when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy
that he collapsed at once, and fell dead.
Then all three were delighted. The huntsman drew off the wolf’s skin
and went home with it. The grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine
which red-cap had brought, and revived, but red-cap thought to herself, as
long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood,
when my mother has forbidden me to do so.
It is also related that once when red-cap was again taking cakes to the
old grandmother, another wolf spoke to her, and tried to entice her from
the path. Red-cap, however, was on her guard, and went straightforward
on her way, and told her grandmother that she had met the wolf, and that
he had said good-morning to her, but with such a wicked look in his eyes,
that if they had not been on the public road she was certain he would have
eaten her up. Well, said the grandmother, we will shut the door, that he
may not come in. Soon afterwards the wolf knocked, and cried, open the
door, grandmother, I am little red-cap, and am bringing you some cakes.
But they did not speak, or open the door, so the grey-beard stole twice or
thrice round the house, and at last jumped on the roof, intending to wait
until red-cap went home in the evening, and then to steal after her and
devour her in the darkness. But the grandmother saw what was in his
thoughts. In front of the house was a great stone trough, so she said to the
child, take the pail, red-cap. I made some sausages yesterday, so carry the
water in which I boiled them to the trough. Red-cap carried until the great
trough was quite full. Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and
he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out his neck so far that
he could no longer keep his footing and began to slip, and slipped down
from the roof straight into the great trough, and was drowned. But red-
cap went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.
CHAPTER 9
Texts: Hamlet
Abstract Problematic nature of term “text” is examined, with reference to

work of semiotician Yuri Lotman and several contemporary discourse analysts.
Different definitions of the term “text” are offered, with notion of “structural
cohesion” suggested as very important in determining what makes a collection
of words a text. Role of contexts in shaping meaning of texts is considered.
Application Numerous and conflicting explanation of Shakespeare’s

Hamlet and nature of hero of the play, Hamlet, and other characters are
described. Semiotic-structural analysis of play, with polar opposites, is also
offered.
Keywords Text Structural cohesion Context Hamlet Hamlet
Language use is of course not limited to spoken language, but also

involves written (or printed) language, communication, and interaction,
as is the case when we read our daily newspaper, our textbooks, our mail
(on paper of e-mail), or the myriad of different text types that have to do
with our academic or other work. Although many discourse analysts

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_9
specifically focus on spoken language or talk, it is therefore useful to

include written texts in the concept of discourse . . . In the same way what
as “text” is mostly used to refer to the product of writing, “talk” is often
studied as the product of speaking or as ongoing interaction, without
paying much attention to the language users involved or the other
aspects of the whole communicative event . . . In sum, discourse studies
are about talk and text in context.
Teun A. van Dijk, “The Study of Discourse” in Discourse as
Structure and Process (1997:2–3)
Text . . . Outside linguistics it is most often used to refer to written discourse

(e.g., a work of literature is a “text”); within linguistics it is commonly used
to refer to any specific piece of discourse, whether spoken, written or
multimodal . . . But some linguists do make a more theoretical distinction
between discourse and text. For Henry Widdowson, for instance, the term
text denotes a linguistic object (e.g., the words on a page in a book, or the
transcript of a conversation), whereas discourse is the process of interaction
with interpretation of the object that produces its meaning in
context . . . The view of discourse analysis taken here . . . is a “holistic” one,
which acknowledges that discourse analysis is several things at once. It is a
method for doing social research; it is a body of empirical knowledge about
how talk and text are organized; it is the home of various theories about the
nature and working of human communication, and also theories about the
construction and reproduction of social reality. It is both about language
and about life.
Deborah Cameron and Ivan Panovic, Working with Written Discourse
It may be a bit of a simplification, but it seems that when linguists

leapt over the wall that had been confining them to phrases and
sentences, they found themselves having to deal with something extre-
mely problematic for them—sequences of sentences, or texts. But what
is a text? (Stanley Fish, a professor at Yale, wrote an article “Is There a
Text in This Class?” He was playing with a question students often ask
their professors—they want to know if there is a text book that will be
used in a class they are taking. When Fish asked this question, he was
dealing with what texts are and how people find meaning in them. Is
the meaning in the text itself or in the mind of the reader of the text,
on in the case of multimodal analysis, is the text in the combination of
words and images or is it in the mind of the person viewing the
image?)
9 TEXTS: HAMLET 79
Yuri Lotman
We see that the term “text” is very problematic and the subject of
considerable controversy among academics. Texts have to be coherent
and have meaning; they can’t be just a jumble of words. But what other
characteristics do texts have? Yuri Lotman, an influential Russian theorist,
defines texts in his book, The Structure of the Artistic Text, as follows
(1977:6):
But if art is a special means of communication, a language organized in a

particular manner (our concept of language derives from the broad semiotic
definition: any ordered system which serves as a means of communication
and employs signs), then works of art, that is messages, can be viewed as
texts.
Lotman then devotes almost 300 pages to dealing with topics such as the
problem of meaning in artistic texts, the concept of the text, structural
principles in texts and so on.
One problem I faced in my work on popular culture involved serial texts:
what do we do with serial texts such as the comic strip Blondie, which ran for
many decades (and still may be in print in certain newspapers). Consider, for
example, a comic strip such as Dick Tracy, which had hundreds of millions
of readers and which lasted many years. Tracy had various battles with killers
of one kind or another (Flattop, the Mole, etc.) that lasted for several
months or so, and then when he had disposed of one killer, a second one
made his appearance. Or consider soap operas that can run for twenty or
thirty years. What is the text in the case of Dick Tracy? Is it a particular
adventure with the Mole or is it the whole strip? What is the text of a soap
opera? There is a question about how we deal with serial texts.
What I did when I wrote my dissertation on Li’l Abner was take what I
considered to be representative episodes of the comic strip and important
characters in the strip and analyze them and their role in the strip as a way
of dealing with it. So my answer is that in dealing with serial comic strips,
one must deal with representative episodes and characters (a representative
sample) and assume that they provide insights into the entire comic strip.
What happens, we may ask, when you take a comic strip like Li’l Abner and
turn it into a musical comedy or a novel like The Maltese Falcon and make a
film based on it. Are these new texts derivative or do they have their own
value and validity? In some case, films made from novels are better than
the novels on which they are based.
In their book, Working with Written Discourse, Cameron and
Panovic offer their sense of what texts are (2014:4):
If discourse analysis deals with “language above the sentence,” that means it
looks for structural patterns in units which are larger, more extended, than
one sentence—the “connected series of utterances” or “text” of the dic-
tionary definition.
One of the earliest discourse analysts, the linguist Selig Harris posed the
question: how do we tell whether a sequence of sentences is, in fact, a text—
that the sentences relate to one another and collectively form some larger
whole—rather than a random collection of unrelated bits? The answer to
that question, Harris thought, would make clear what kind of structure
exists “above the sentence.” Texts would have structure whereas random
collection of sentences would not.
Cameron and Panovic suggest that structural cohesion is one of the

signifiers of a text. They point out that another linguist, Henry
Widdowson, argues that a text can be one word—such as “Ladies” on a
sign before women’s bathroom. This leads Cameron and Panovic to argue
that a better way to understand discourse would be “language in use,”
which focuses attention on who is using the language and the context in
which the language is used. Context is very important and plays a big role
in generating meaning. If someone says “pass the hypodermic needle,” it
means one thing in a hospital and another thing in a dark alley.
9 TEXTS: HAMLET 81
Woman with hair rollers
People from different disciplines and from different schools of thought

within a discipline (for example, Freudians and Jungians in psychoanalytic
thought) find different things in a given text. The reason this is possible is
that texts store an enormous amount of material in them. This point was
made by Lotman, who wrote in The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977:17):
Since it can concentrate a tremendous amount of information into the

“area” of a very small text . . . an artistic text manifests yet another feature:
it transmits different information to different readers in proportion to each
one’s comprehension; it provides the reader with a language in which each
successive portion of information may be assimilated with repeated reading.
It behaves as a kind of living organism which has a feedback channel to the
reader and thereby instructs him. (1977:23)
Lotman’s two points are very important for us to keep in mind. First,
everything in a text such as a play, a film, a commercial, or a photograph is
important; and second, the more you know, the more you can see in a text.
Texts, Lotman reminds us, contain an enormous amount of information
and are much more complicated than we might imagine. This notion that
texts are storehouses of information explains, for example, why we can
read novels several times and see films or plays a number of times and still
enjoy the experience. That’s because we see new things in the novel each
time we read it and we see new things in the play each time we see it. As we
shall see, there’s no end of differing and conflicting interpretations of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamlet drawing
APPLICATION: CRITICAL MODALITIES

FOR INTERPRETING HAMLET
Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet is one of the most fascinating and remarkable

texts in the English language. It has been made into many films over the years
with Hamlet being played by actors such as Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth
Branaugh, Mel Gibson, and more recently Benedict Cumberbatch, and
thus can be seen as part of pop or mass-mediated culture. It is so deep and
rich that audiences are still fascinated by it, four hundred years after it was first
staged. Every generation finds new things in the play and so there have been
countless productions of the play with different interpretations of the hero,
Hamlet, in different milieu, with different costumes, different interpretations
—but always the same lines that Shakespeare wrote. Except, that is, for satires
and parodies of the text.
As one of the greatest, if not the greatest play in the English
language, Hamlet offers the discourse analyst an incredible text for
analysis. I offer here some interpretations of the play by a variety of
scholars who, thinking about the many disciplines that comprise dis-
course analysis (as explained by van Dijk above) we may say, function
as proto-discourse analysts. A number of them use dialogue from the
text in their interpretations.
Consider the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s
analysis of Hamlet’s lines:
9 TEXTS: HAMLET 83
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!
The following quotation by Goethe comes from Ernest Jones’ Hamlet

and Oedipus: A Classic in the Psychoanalysis of Literature. Jones quotes
from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1949:31):
To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the

effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In
this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed. Here is an oak-tree
planted a costly vase, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its
bosom; the roots expand, the vase is shivered.
A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of
nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and
must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard.
Impossibilities have been required of him, not in themselves impossibilities,
but such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances
and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but
lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of
mind.
For Goethe the key to the play is that Hamlet is not equal to the task he is
given and is destroyed by a burden too great for him.
Let me offer my interpretation of the play now, with a chart that reflects
some of the most important elements of the play and the polar oppositions
that give them meaning.
HAMLET
Ghost of Hamlet’s father Live Uncle Claudius

Revelation by Ghost (uncover) Uncle’s Deception (cover up)
Action by Hamlet Inaction by Hamlet
Victim Murderer
Grave Digger Polonius
Earthly Wisdom Official Wisdom
Revenge and Justice Ambition and Lust
Play about imaginary King and Queen Actual King and Queen
Ophelia Gertrude
Sexual Love Oedipal Love
Horatio Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
FORTINBRAS
In the middle of the page, at the top we find HAMLET. Underneath, on the
left-hand side there is the Ghost of his Father and on the right-hand side,
opposite the Ghost, we find his Live Uncle: Claudius. Underneath the Ghost
we find Revelation (uncover) and opposite it, there is Deception (cover up).
Underneath Revelations there is Action by Hamlet and opposite it there is
Inaction by Hamlet. Under Action by Hamlet we find Victim and opposite it
we find Murderer. Under Victim there is Grave Digger and opposite it,
under Murderer, we find poor Polonius. Under the Grave Digger there is
Earthly Wisdom which is the opposite of Official Wisdom. Under Earthly
Wisdom there is Revenge and Justice and opposite it, Ambition and Lust.
Under Revenge and Justice we find the Players in play within the play and
opposite them are the Actual King and Queen. Under the players we find
Ophelia and opposite her Gertrude. Under Ophelia we find Sexual Love that
is the opposite of Oedipal Love. Under Sexual Love we find Horatio and
opposite Oedipal Love we find Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And finally,
in the middle, at the bottom of the list we find FORTINBRAS.
The first set of oppositions has to do with the goals of the two char-
acters. The Ghost of Hamlet’s father stands for revelation. It wants
Hamlet to uncover what has happened and take action. That, of course,
is a central problem of the play. Hamlet’s uncle, on the other hand, stands
for deception. He wants to cover up what has happened and, hopefully,
prevent Hamlet from acting. The Ghost, Hamlet’s father, is the victim and
Hamlet’s uncle is the murderer. You can see that polarity quite easily.
Hamlet’s actions are motivated by revenge and justice, while Claudius’
actions are motivated by lust and naked ambition.
Next, we contrast the players, who put on the play with the play about a
fictional king and a queen, and Claudius and Gertrude, the real king and
queen. It is the play, of course, in which Hamlet says he’ll “catch the
conscience of the king.” And so he does. There are other oppositions, as
well . . . the grave digger, who represents earthly wisdom, the wisdom of
the common people contrasts with Polonius, who represents official wis-
dom, a kind of philosophical, abstract, pedantic wisdom we find in many
people. We can see that Ophelia and Gertrude as opposites, also. Ophelia
represents sexual love and Gertrude, as far as Hamlet is concerned, who
represents a repressed Oedipal attachment. This is followed by having
Horatio, on the side in which we find Hamlet, and on the opposing
side, Rosencranz and Guildenstern. And finally, underneath Hamlet’s
place in the middle of the two sets of polarities, we have Fortinbras,
back from Poland, who has, Hamlet says, “my dying voice.”
9 TEXTS: HAMLET 85
The question we must ask is whether the structure in the chart is

actually in Hamlet or is it in the mind of the structuralist critic and some-
thing that has been imposed upon the text? Was the set of oppositions in
the mind of the critic or was it, somehow, in Shakespeare’s unconscious
mind? Saussure explained the way the mind works. He said, “in language
there are only differences.” So there is reason to suggest that deep in
Shakespeare’s unconscious, there was a set of oppositions much like the
ones described in the chart.
It was Sigmund Freud who saw that the relationship between Hamlet
and his mother had Oedipal elements to it. As Freud wrote in his letter to
Wilhelm Fleiss on October 15, 1897 (quoted in Martin Grotjahn, Beyond
Laughter 1957:84–85):
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Only one idea of
general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother and
jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a
general phenomenon of early childhood, even if it does not always occur
so early in children who have been made hysterics. . . . If that is the case,
the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite all rational objections to the
inexorable fate that the story presupposes becomes intelligible, and one
can understand why later fate dramas were such failures. Our feelings rise
against any arbitrary individual fate . . . but the Greek myth seizes on a
compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it
himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in
fantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone
to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his
infantile from his present state.
The idea has passed through my head that the same thing may lie at the
root of Hamlet. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions, but
supposing rather that he was impelled to write it by a real event because his
unconscious understood that of his hero. How can one explain the hysteric
Hamlet’s phrase “So conscience doth make cowards of us all,” and his
hesitation to avenge his father by killing his uncle, when he himself so casually
sends his courtiers to their death and dispatches Laertes to quickly? How
better than by the torment roused in him by the obscure memory that he
himself had meditated the same deed against his father because of passion for
his mother–“use every man after his desert and who should scape whipping?”
Freud’s letter helps us understand Hamlet’s behavior and makes the

structuralist analysis of the play more reasonable. The play is so enigmatic
and the characters so interesting that there have been countless other
interpretations of the text.
The material that follows, on different interpretations of Hamlet, is based
on discussions in Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus. As Jones points out, some
critics have suggested that Hamlet’s behavior shows that he does a kind of
doubling—he splits his father into the Ghost, his good father, and Claudius,
his evil father. Hamlet resents the fact that his dead father had—and his living
step-father has—sexual access to Gertrude, his mother and Hamlet identifies
with both the Ghost and Claudius, unconsciously, of course. Hamlet has
idealized his dead father and in a strange way identified with Claudius, who
actually killed Hamlet’s father. Freudians would argue that Hamlet uncon-
sciously wanted to kill his father as the result of his Oedipal Complex. And
Claudius has what Hamlet unconsciously desired most of all, his mother
Gertrude.
Gertrude’s sexuality, which is uncontrolled and powerful, is a major
aspect of the play. Hamlet cannot have Gertrude and this leads Hamlet to
have powerful and almost uncontrollable feelings of maternal malevo-
lence. It is his mother’s quick remarriage to Claudius that galls Hamlet
most. As he puts it, in some very important lines,
Frailty thy name is woman–

A little month or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body
Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she–
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galléd eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets.
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
So Hamlet is devastated by the speed with which his mother has forgotten
his father and without a suitable period of mourning, has remarried. He
makes this speech before he meets the Ghost of his father. That’s impor-
tant because it suggests that Hamlet is already suicidal.
9 TEXTS: HAMLET 87
Gertrude eventually recognizes what she has done. When Hamlet has
put on his “antic disposition” and is feigning madness, she tells Claudius
that she thinks Hamlet’s behavior is due to “His father’s death and our
o’erhasty marriage.” Hamlet has been told by the Ghost of his dead father
not to harm Gertrude but to “leave her to heaven,” so Hamlet decides
that he will “speak daggers to her but use none.”
Other critics have argued that Hamlet also doubled his mother into
Gertrude and Ophelia and he exhibited a pronounced disgust with
both . . . and with female sexuality in general. They are both, for Hamlet,
significant parts of the “unweeded garden” where things “rank and gross
in nature” grow. These lines about the “unweeded garden” are found in
his famous soliloquy that starts “O, that this too sullied flesh would melt”
which also contain the lines
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Hamlet has made this speech before he has met the Ghost of his father,
showing that his father’s death and Gertrude’s hasty remarriage have
traumatized him. It is his mother—and more precisely his mother’s now
contaminated body—that is pushing him toward suicide. Her marriage has
made it impossible for his idealized father to give him an adequate sense of
identity.
Hamlet’s dead father, according to Freudian theory, can be seen as a
superego figure—a ghostly of embodiment of conscience and guilt. The
last words the Ghost has for Hamlet are “remember me.” What this means
is that Hamlet must be ever mindful of acting correctly, must be able to
feel guilt and, and this is particularly important, must be willing to repair
wrong doing. Reparation, I believe, is very important, generally following
upon love that turns to hate. That’s the way it works—love, then hate,
then reparation . . . and the cycle repeats itself, endlessly.
Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, is a classic id figure—one dominated by
her libido, her sexual drives, her all-controlling need for sexual gratifica-
tion. As I pointed out earlier, she recognizes that her hasty marriage to
Claudius, who is also an id figure, has caused problems for Hamlet. But
being controlled by her id, she is unable to restrain herself. And Hamlet is
an ego figure—but a weak one, who finds it difficult to act because he lacks
ego strength and is overwhelmed by his own unconscious desire for
Gertrude. He is caught in the middle between his dead father’s ghost,
symbolically representing the superego, and his mother and Claudius,

both symbolically representing the id.
Hamlet is only able to kill Claudius, we must remember, after Gertrude
had drunk from a poison cup that was meant for Hamlet. Laertes had
poisoned the tip of his sword and nicked Hamlet. But then, in the course
of their swordplay, Hamlet exchanged swords with Laertes and nicked
him. Laertes then says, “I’m justly killed with my own treachery.” Laertes
explains that his sword point was poisoned and that he and Hamlet will
both die.
“No med’cine in the world can do thee good,” Laertes says. The poison
she has drunk from the cup intended for Hamlet now takes effect on
Gertrude. She swoons and her last lines are
“No, no, the drink, the drink! O my dear Hamlet!
The drink, the drink! I am poisoned.”
Laertes in his dying words tells Hamlet that his mother’s been poisoned
and that Claudius is to blame. Hamlet then stabs Claudius and makes him
drink from the cup with the poison and he dies. Then, after passing the
mantle on to Fortinbras, with the words “the rest is silence,” Hamlet dies.
There is a famous passage in the play that is relevant to the different
interpretations we find of the play:
HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

POLONIUS By th“ mass, and”tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET Or like a whale.
POLONIUS Very like a whale.
There are, Hamlet shows us, many different ways of seeing something,
whether it is a cloud or a film or a play, and, in particular, an incredible
number of interpretations of both the hero of the play, Hamlet and the
play, Hamlet, that have been offered by critics over the years. The central
problem, of course, is why Hamlet delayed killing Claudius.
For example, one critic has argued that Hamlet really was a woman who
was raised, for some obscure reason, as a man. That would make his/her
relationships with Ophelia and Gertrude very complicated and might
explain some of his, rather “her” actions. The German critic, Turck,
argued that Shakespeare imposed on Hamlet a task that he was not
equal to, a task that was beyond his capacities. That explains why
9 TEXTS: HAMLET 89
Hamlet kept delaying, since he unconsciously recognized that his task was
too great for him. He lacked the energy and the nerve of a hero and thus
sank under a burden that he could not renounce but which he also could
not carry out. Another German critic, A. von Berger (no relation), argued
that the matter of killing Claudius was beneath his dignity, Hamlet being
too wise and too noble for this pernicious world.
Some critics have suggested that the play is about the disastrous effects
of a guilty mother on a highly impressionable son. Others have said it is a
double revenge story—Hamlet seeking to revenge his murdered father
and Laertes seeking to revenge Hamlet’s killing of Polonius. Some scho-
lars have seen Hamlet as the quintessential Protestant and his revolution
against Claudius as paralleling the Protestant revolution against
Catholicism. Others have seen him as a Jew who symbolizes and concre-
tizes, in his own experience, all the suffering and trauma the Jews have
experienced throughout history. Still others have seen the play as a defense
of Roman Catholicism.
We can think of the ideal critic of Hamlet as a person with multiple
personalities, each personality being a different kind of critic. Each of these
personalities sees different things in Hamlet—and the same thing would
apply to any other text, for that matter—and each kind of critic seeks out
justifications in the text for his or her views. Finally, we must keep in mind
that there are some who argue that Hamlet is a flawed play and thus there
is no really good explanation of his failure to kill Claudius at the earliest
possible moment.
What these various interpretations of Hamlet’s behavior and the play
reveal is that a text can have many different interpretations and that there is
no one interpretation that will satisfy everyone. It is what critics bring to
Hamlet or any text, in terms of their beliefs and critical ideologies and
disciplinary perspectives that shape their interpretations. For the discourse
analysis, Hamlet is an incredibly rich text in which the dialogue, even in
small parts of it, presents interesting problems.
CHAPTER 10
Myths: The Myth Model
Abstract Several definitions of “myth” are offered, and the ideas of

Mircea Eliade on the role of camouflaged myths in contemporary societies
are discussed. The role of myths in popular culture is explored. The way
discourse analysis can be used to analyze myths and the important role of
language in myths is considered.
Application A model in which the way myth informs contemporary culture

and society is offered. This model is based on speculations by the author in
the 1970s and is found in a book by the author, Media, Myth and Society
published in 2013. Myth of Oedipus is run through the myth model as an
example of how a myth informs cultures. A learning game in which readers
are asked to trace a myth through the parts of the model is provided.
Keywords Myth Model Language Popular culture Oedipus
(1) If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, it cannot reside in the

isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the
way these elements are combined. (2) Although a myth belongs to the same
category as language, being, as a matter of fact, only part of it, language in
myth exhibits specific properties. (3) Those properties are only to be found
above the ordinary linguistic level, that is, they exhibit more complex features
than those which are to be found in any other kind of linguistic expression.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964:206)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_10
I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by
treating “collective representations” as sign systems, one might hope to
go farther than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail
for the mystification that transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a uni-
versal nature. . . . Right from the start, the notion of myth seemed to me
to explain the examples of the falsely obvious. At that time, I still used
the world “myth” in its traditional sense. But I was already certain of a
fact from which I later tried to draw all the consequences: myth is a
language.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Perseus slaying the Minotaur. Photo of mosaic taken by author

10 MYTHS: THE MYTH MODEL 93
Myths are texts that play a more important role in our lives than we imagine.
In Greek, the word “mythos” means story. I find Raphael Patai’s definition
of myth, in his book Myth and Modern Man, useful. He writes (1972:2):
Myth . . . is a traditional religious charter, which operates by validating laws,

customs, rites, institutions and beliefs, or explaining socio-cultural situations
and natural phenomena, and taking the form of stories, believed to be true,
about divine beings and heroes . . . Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred
charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites
and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving alterations.
Patai points out that myths play a an important role in shaping social life
and writes that “myth not only validates or authorizes customs, rites,
institutions, beliefs, and so forth, but frequently is directly responsible
for creating them.” (1972:2).
The Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) offers a
traditional definition of myth:
myth. [Gk mythos] (1830) 1a: A usu. Traditional story of ostensibly histor-
ical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain
a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon. b: PARABLE, ALLEGORY 2a: a
popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone;
esp. one embodying the ideals and institutions or a society or segment of
society . . . b: an unfounded or false notion.
My focus here is on the first part of this definition, which suggests that
myths play a role in shaping people’s world views. I am interested in the
roles myths play in contemporary culture and society. That is why Mircea
Eliade’s writings about myth are so useful. He writes, in his book, The
Sacred and The Profane, that many of our activities in contemporary
society can be seen as camouflaged or modernized versions of ancient
myths and legends. As he explains (1961:204–205):
The modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a
large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals. As we remarked
earlier, the festivities that go with the New Year or with taking up residence in a
new house, though laicized, still exhibit the structure of a ritual of renewal.
The same phenomenon is observable in the merrymaking that accompanies a
marriage or a social advancement, and so on. A whole volume could well be
written on the myths of modern man, on the mythologies camouflaged in the

plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads. The cinema, that “dream
factory,” takes over and employs countless mythological motifs—the fight
between hero and monster, initiatory combats and ordeals, paradigmatic
figures (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and so on). Even
reading includes a mythological function, not only because it replaces the
recitation of myths in archaic societies and the oral literature that still lives in
the rural communities of Europe, but particularly because, through reading,
the modern man succeeds in obtaining an “escape from time” comparable to
the “emergence from time” effected by myths.
Eliade defines myth, I should add, as the recitation of a sacred history, “a

primordial event that took place at the beginning of time” (1961:95).
Many of the heroes and villains in myths have a symbolic significance,
which helps explain their significance, for, as Eliade explains (1961:211),
“it is through symbols that man finds his way out of his particular situation
and ‘opens himself’ to the general and the universal. Symbols awaken
individual experience and transmute it into a spiritual act, into metaphy-
sical comprehension of the world.”
The Canadian semiotician and culture theorist Marcel Danesi offers a
discussion of myth that suggests the roles myth play in contemporary pop-
ular culture. He writes in Understanding Media Semiotics (2002:46–48):
As Barthes argued [in Mythologies], the themes humanities of earliest

stories, known as myths, continue to permeate and inform pop culture’s
story-telling efforts. As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other
ancient heroes, Superman’s exploits revolve around a universal mythic
theme—the struggle of Good and Evil. This is what makes Superman,
or any action hero for that matter, so intuitively appealing to modern
audiences. . . . The word “myth” derives from the Greek mythos: “word,”
“speech,” “tale of the gods.” It can be defined as a narrative in which the
characters are gods, heroes, and mystical beings, in which the plot is
about the origin of things or about metaphysical events in human life,
and in which the setting is a metaphysical world juxtaposed against the
real world. In the beginning stages of human cultures, myths functioned
as genuine “narrative theories” of the world. That is why all cultures have
created them to explain their origins. . . . The use of mythic themes and
elements in media representations has become so widespread that it is
hardly noticed any longer, despite Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late
1950s. Implicit myths about the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes
to lead us forward, and so on and so forth, constitute the narrative
underpinnings of TV programmes, blockbuster movies, advertisements

and commercials, and virtually anything that gets “media air time.”
We see, then, how myth still plays a role in our popular culture and media.
Many of our modern superheroes have connections to earlier heroes—and
this is understandable because when we create heroes and heroines, we
base them on our knowledge of past heroes and heroines and certain
themes in our culture. Bakhtin called this kind of behavior “intertextual-
ity,” which means that texts all borrow from other texts—sometimes
consciously but often unconsciously. I will discuss his theories in more
detail in my chapter on intertextuality.
For the discourse analyst, the focus must be on the language found in
the myth and the role this language plays in the text: in the events that
transpire in it and in the way the myth is resolved. In addition, it is
important to consider how the language in the myth and the myth, itself,
have impacted on Western European and American culture and society.
What I will do now is suggest a model, involving myth that shows how
myths permeate our culture and play a role in many aspects of our everyday
life. I call this model the “myth model,” and I will discuss it in the
applications section of this chapter.
APPLICATIONS: THE MYTH MODEL

I spent many years thinking about preliminary versions of this model, until I
finally worked it out and wrote a book about it, Media, Myth and Society,
published in 2013 as a Palgrave Pivot book. I first started thinking about
myths and their role in culture in the sixties. In 1974, I did a drawing, in an
article I published called “The Secret Agent,” in the Journal of
Communication that has a preliminary version of my myth model.
My original model didn’t have psychoanalytic theory in it, but as
I thought about myth and the way it informed so much of our culture, it
seemed to me that I should add psychoanalytic theory to the model since I
saw a strong connection between myths and the psyche. I offer my myth
model below and then will provide an example of how one can take a myth—
the story of Oedipus—and show how it pervades our cultures.
a myth, defined as a sacred narrative that validates and informs cultural

beliefs and practices
psychoanalytic reflections of the myth (when we can find them)
Page from Secret Agent article

historical manifestations of that myth (when we can find them)

the myth in elite culture (operas, poetry, classical music, theater, serious
novels, etc.)
the myth in mass-mediated or popular culture (songs, advertisements, tv
shows, films, etc.)
the myth in everyday life (routines we follow, etc.)
This list is adapted from one I used in Media and Myth as is the
example based on the Oedipus myth. In this myth, Oedipus—without
recognizing what he was doing, killed a man he met on a journey, at
the via bifurcata, who happened to be his father, King Laius, and
married a woman in Thebes, Jocasta, who, so he discovered later, to
his horror, was his mother. When he was a small child Oedipus had
been tied up and sent to a hill to be exposed to the elements and die
because an oracle told his father that his son would kill him. What
Laius didn’t know was that Oedipus was rescued by a shepherd and
brought to a distant kingdom, Corinth, where he grew up. He was
raised by the king of Corinth, Polybus. When Oedipus heard that the
oracle had made a prophecy that he would kill his father, Oedipus left
the kingdom where he grew up, to avoid killing Polybus, the man he
thought was his father, and ended up killing a man, Laius, who
actually was his father. Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphynx,
which was eating men who could not solve its riddle and terrifying
Thebes. Oedipus was proclaimed a great hero. He ended up marrying
Jocasta, the widow of Laius and, unknown to him, his mother. Later,
when his sons were grown, he discovered what he had done, he put
out his eyes.
Myth/Sacred Story Oedipus Myth. Theme of son unknowingly killing father and
marrying mother.
Psychoanalytic Oedipus Complex. Love of child for parent of opposite gender.
manifestation.
Historical Experience Revolutions: American, French, Arab awakenings, etc. Small
triumphs over large.
Elite Culture Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Shakespeare, Hamlet
Popular Culture Jack the Giant Killer
James Bond novels, films
King Kong
Everyday Life Oedipus period in little children. “I love my daddy.”
The myth I used, the Oedipus Complex, is a topic about which there is
considerable debate in psychoanalytic circles, but I think the chart shows
how the Oedipus Complex can be seen as permeating contemporary life
and culture. And we can do the same kind of analysis for many other
myths, such as:
Prometheus, Medusa,
Narcissus, Sisyphus,
Hercules, Odysseus,
David and Goliath, Adam and Eve.
Below I provide a chart with space for you to take a myth and “run it
through” my myth model. Underneath the chart you should explain and
amplify your examples for the myth you’ve chosen in a manner similar to
what I’ve done in my charts.
Myth Model Myth
Myth/Sacred Story
Psychoanalytic manifestation
Historical Experience
Elite Culture
Popular Culture
Everyday Life
This is an interesting exercise because it makes people who play this game
suddenly aware of the role that certain myths have played in their societies
and consider the possibility that myths, without their being aware of their
role, have also had an impact on their thinking and behavior.
CHAPTER 11
Genres: Uses and Gratifications
Abstract The term “genre” is defined and the problematic nature of

genres is discussed, with a focus on genre in films. The enigma of genres
is explored: do genres arise out of a body of works with similar formulas or
do formulas generate genre texts. It is suggested that genre works, such as
the novel and film The Maltese Falcon, can also be great works of art.
Application The “Uses and Gratifications” approach to dealing with

genre texts is explored, with a focus on the work of Janice Radway on
Romance readers and the role of these texts in their lives.
Keywords Genre Uses and gratifications Romance novels
Genre . . . has come to be defined as a linguistically distinctive staged activity

carried out for some recognized social purpose that is achieved by using
language. . . . Genre can then be used to explain and predict both the overall
macro structure of some linguistic product, in for example the unfolding of a
narrative, or of a service encounter, or of a news article. Furthermore,
particular collections of linguistic features may occur at each stage of that
product. And all of these properties are in turn related to, and motivated by,
the communicative purpose of the linguistic product as a whole.
John Bateman, Judy Delin and Renate Henschel. “Mapping the
Multimodal Genres of Traditional and Electronic Newspapers.”
In Terry D. Royce and Wendy Bowcher, eds. New Directions
in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_11
A genre is never defined solely by its constitutive set of functions but by

interaction between characters and by their development as individuals. As a
result, I have assumed further that the romantic genre is additionally defined
for the women by a set of characters whose personalities and behaviors can
be “coded” or summarized through the course of the reading process in
specific ways . . . By pursuing similarities in the behaviors of these characters
and by attempting to understand what those behaviors signify to these
readers, I have sought to avoid summarizing them according to my own
beliefs about and standards for gender behavior.
Janet Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1991.
You Said You Loved Me cover
The term “genre” is French and means kind or class. Thus, when we talk
about genre, we are interested in species of texts such as mysteries (classi-
cal, procedural, and tough guy private-eye), horror stories, television
commercials, science fiction stories, romances, westerns, and spy stories,
regardless of what medium in which we find them: books, comic books,
films, videos, or television shows. Generally speaking, genre texts are
considered “low brow” and not of much literary value since they are so
formulaic. But there is within each genre room for imagination and
invention.
11 GENRES: USES AND GRATIFICATIONS 101
In the epigraph, the discussion of genre by the linguists suggests that

genres are complex works that lend themselves to the kind of analysis done
by discourse theorists. For discourse theorists, certain things must happen
at different stages in a genre text for them to function successfully and
these steps, one might suggest, are internalized by fans of genres who
recognize, because of their continued exposure to the genre, if something
is missing in the text.
Genre stories are formulaic in nature and rely upon widely known
and accepted conventions and plot structures. These help audiences
understand what happens in texts and helps writers create these texts,
many of which contain conventions that are linguistic in nature. That is
because writers can rely upon expectations on the part of audiences and
can use formulas to satisfy these expectations. We can make a distinc-
tion between formulaic texts, such as classical mysteries, and non-for-
mulaic texts that are highly inventive, which makes them difficult to
read, such as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. I have tried to read
Finnegan’s Wake many times, but I always gave up because I didn’t
know what anything meant in the book. Curiously, I suggested it to an
English surgeon who bought the book and thoroughly enjoyed reading
it—perhaps because being an Englishman he could recognize many of
the allusions found in the book.
John Cawelti’s book, The Six-Gun Mystique (1971:29) defines a for-
mula as “a conventional system for structuring cultural products. It can be
distinguished from invented structures which are new ways of organizing
works of art.” Formulas, for Cawelti, are like “recipes” that are used to
create genre texts. For him, the genre is what is important, not any
particular text—since they all share so much, even though they are all
different in minor ways.
When we write about genre texts, it is useful to consider their for-
mulaic aspects to help us understand why things happen in them the way
they do—and how some texts transcend their genres. Thus, Dashiell
Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is a genre text—a “hard-boiled” mystery,
but it is also, I would suggest, a great work of art.
There is a philosophical problem that we face when considering genres:
do classes of things exist? Are kinds of things or classes of things, such as
the genre “comedies,” as “real” as an example of something, such as an
adventure of Seinfeld? Some philosophers, realists, argue that only parti-
cular things are real and a concept or abstraction such as genre is unreal or
has a secondary status as far as reality is concerned. Tim Bywater and
Thomas Sobchack discuss this matter in their book, An Introduction to

Film Criticism: Major Critical Approaches to Narrative Film (1989:90):
Essentially the problem is the question of which came first, the chicken or
the egg. One has to select a group of films prior to identifying them as a
genre; however the very selection is shaped by definition of the genre
supposedly not yet arrived at. What makes a critic talk about musicals as a
group is some prior notion of what a musical is. Initial attempts to identify
genres emphasized the obvious similarity among films: themes, configura-
tions of action (private-eye’s pursuit of truth), subject matter (cowboys),
objects and costumes (machine guns and dapper suits in films about the
underworld). It is therefore not surprising that the largest body of generic
criticism has been about film groups with the most viable characteristics: the
western, the gangster film, the hard-boiled detective film, and the traditional
horror film. These genres take place in specific settings and in certain time-
frames, they have clearly identifiable plots, conventions and characters, and
they are full of visually obvious an repeatedly used objects, the latter becom-
ing iconic (the white hat on the good cowboy) in their ability to convey
thematic and dramatic information beyond their material function and
presence in a single film.
They raise an interesting point. Unless you have a body of work that can
be classified as a genre, you can’t know that a given text is a genre work
and can be subsumed under the classification of being a mystery or a
horror story.
If you go to a library, generally speaking you will see large portions of
the stacks devoted to genres such as mysteries or fantasy/science fiction. It
is the task of the discourse analyst who is studying texts to show how the
dialogue in these texts, as it related to activities in the texts, achieve certain
effects. Why are genres so ubiquitous and so popular? It is to that question
I turn in the applications to this topic.
APPLICATIONS: USES AND GRATIFICATIONS OF GENRES

Uses and gratifications research focuses upon the uses people make of the
texts they consume and the gratifications they receive from these texts, and
not upon the “effects” that the exposure to these texts have on individuals
and society at large. Sociologists interviewed people who watched soap
operas and other genre texts and found that heavy viewers learned about
life from these texts and found them gratifying in a number of ways. This
led to a focus, by some mass media scholars, on this matter of the uses and
gratifications derived by audiences of certain kinds of genres. We find a
discussion of uses and gratifications in an article by E. Katz, J. G. Blumler
and M. Gurevich, “Utilization of Mass Communication by the
Individual” in G. Gumpert and R. Cathcart (eds.) Inter/Media published
by the Oxford University Press. They discuss research on uses and grati-
fications and offer some examples (1979:215):
Herzog on quiz programs and the gratifications derived from listening to soap
operas; Suchman on the motives for getting interested in serious music on radio;
Wolfe and Fiske on the development of children’s interest in comics . . . Each of
these investigations came up with a list of functions served either by some
specific contents or some medium in question: to match one’s wits against
others, to get information or advice for daily living, to provide a framework
for one’s day, to prepare oneself cultural for the demands of upward mobility, or
to be reassure d about the dignity and usefulness of one’s role.
We see, then, that people find many uses for genre texts. I made a list of
the more common uses and gratifications discussed in media scholarship,
which follows:
Uses and Gratifications Best Genres For
1. To be amused and entertained. Comedies and sitcoms

2. To see authority figures exalted or deflated. News, comedies
3. To experience the beautiful. Love stories, travel shows
4. To have shared experiences with others. Media events
5. To be informed and to satisfy curiosity Science shows, soap operas
6. To identify with the deity and the divine plan. Religious shows, science
fiction
7. To find distraction and diversion. Sports, soap operas
8. To experience empathy. Soap operas, travel shows
9. To experience, in a guilt-free way, extreme Love stories, cop shows
emotions.
10. To find models to imitate. Bio shows, sports, interviews
11. To help gain an identity. Commercials, soaps
12. To gain information about the world. News shows, interviews
13. To reinforce our belief in justice. Mysteries, cop shows
14. To believe in romantic love. Soaps, Love stories
(continued )
Uses and Gratifications Best Genres For
15. To believe in magic, the marvelous Science fiction

and the miraculous.
16. To see others make mistakes. News, sports
17. To see order imposed upon the world. Science shows, news
18. To participate in history (vicariously). Media events, sports
19. To be purged of unpleasant emotions. Soap operas, cop shows
20. To obtain outlets for sexual drives Soap operas, reality shows
in a guilt-free context.
21. To explore taboo subjects with impunity. Soap operas, religious shows
22. To experience the ugly. Science fiction
23. To affirm moral, spiritual, and cultural values. Religious shows, news
24. To see villains in action. Crime shows
In a study of readers of romance novels, Reading the Romance, Janice

Radway, a media scholar and linguist, deals with changes she made in her
thinking about romance novels as she found out more about the romance
readers were studying. She writes (1991:7):
What the book gradually became, then, was less an account of the way
romances as texts were interpreted than of the way romance reading as a
form of behavior operated as a complex intervention in the ongoing social
life of actual social subjects, women who saw themselves first as wives and
mothers.
Based on her experiences romance readers, she concluded that it isn’t

enough to examine a sampling of texts in romance novels and assume
you can analyze the plots and understand the meaning the stories have
for their readers and the uses to which they put these texts. When she
asked the readers in her study why they read romance novels, she got
the following answers (which I’ve modified slightly in the interest of
readability):
To relax.
To learn about faraway places and distant times.
To escape from daily problems.
To have a period of time for myself.
To read stories that are not sad or depressing.
To have a fantasy romance, like the heroine’s.
To follow the adventures of a strong, virile hero.
A number of these uses and gratifications are similar in nature to the list I
offered above. Radway offers a valuable insight that deals with the way
groups like her romance readers use media (1991:222):
If we can learn, then, to look at the ways in which various groups appropriate
and use the mass-produced art of our culture, I suspect we may well begin to
understand that although the ideological power of contemporary cultural
forms is enormous, indeed sometimes even frightening, that power is not yet
all-pervasive, totally vigilant, or complete. Interstices still exist with the
social fabric where opposition is carried on by people who are not satisfied
by their place within it or by the restricted material and emotional rewards
that accompany it. (p. 222)
Her point is that people have the capacity to use mass mediated texts for
their own purposes and the media, although they are very powerful, can be
and often are resisted by people who consume and use the media—a point
made by Michel de Certeau who argues in his book The Practice of
Everyday Life. He argues that audiences of media often manipulate and
transform the texts, in the way they perceive and understand them, to suit
their needs and desires.
In making a uses and gratifications analysis of a text, as a discourse
analyst, it is important to point out what language, events and actions by
characters in the genre text generate each gratification. You have to make
the connections and not just assume that anyone or everyone will recog-
nize that a given statement is connected to a certain gratification. Let me
suggest, here, an exercise, that will require you to tie dialogue in a text,
you will write, to specific uses and gratifications.
Learning Exercise: A Science Fiction Short Story

In this story you will adhere to the conventions of the science fiction genre
and will write a short story of about 500 words that has dialogue and
action that generate any four of the following gratifications:
To see authority figures exalted or deflated.
To experience, in a guilt-free way, extreme emotions.
To find models to imitate.
To gain information about the world.
To reinforce our belief in justice.
To believe in romantic love.
To believe in magic, the marvelous and the miraculous.

To experience the ugly.
To see villains in action.
This story should be team-written by a group of three students, one of

whom does the writing but all of whom participate in writing the story.
My experience in playing learning games with students suggest the
following:
1. Please make the story up as you go along and do not spend time trying
to figure out a plot before starting to write.
2. Be mindful of the names of characters.
3. Have, descriptions of the characters, dialogue by the characters,
actions by the characters and a suitable conclusion.
4. Remember also you must follow the conventions of the science
fiction genre.
CHAPTER 12
Humor: Jokes
Abstract This chapter deals with four “why” theories of humor: superiority,
incongruity, psychoanalytic, and paradoxical-meta-communication. They
are contrasted with the “what” theory of humor that focuses upon forty-
five techniques that are used to generate mirthful laughter in humorous texts
of all kinds. The difference between the comic and the tragic is considered.
Application The forty-five techniques found in humorous texts are listed and
some jokes and other humorous are analyzed using the techniques. A number
of jokes are then offered for readers to analyze using the techniques.
Keywords Humor Superiority Incongruity Psychoanalytic

Techniques
Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the
great interior censor; it liberates from the fear that has developed in man
during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of power. It
unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning. Laughter opened
men’s eyes on that which is new, on the future. This is why it why it not only
permitted the expression of an anti feudal, popular truth; it helped uncover
this truth and give it an internal form. And this form was achieved and
defended during thousands of years in its very depths and in its popular-
festive images. Laughter showed the world anew in its gayest and most sober
aspects. Its external privileges are intimately linked with interior forces; they

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_12
are a recognition of the rights of these forces. This is why laughter could
never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always
remained a free weapon in their hands.
As opposed to laughter, medieval seriousness was infused with elements
of fear, weakness, humility, submission, falsehood, hypocrisy, or on the
other hand with violence, intimidation, threats, prohibitions. As a spokes-
man of power, seriousness terrorized, demanded and forbade . . . Distrust of
the serious tone and confidence in the truth of laughter had a spontaneous,
elemental character. It was understood that fear never lurks behind laugh-
ter . . . and that hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask.
Laughter created no dogmas and could not become authoritarian; it did
not convey fear but a feeling of strength. It was linked with the procreating
act, with birth, renewal, fertility, abundance. Laughter was also related to
food and drink and the people’s earthy immortality, and finally it was related
to the future of things to come and was to clear the way for them.
M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World: 1984:94–95
How do you break a Pole’s finger? Punch him in the nose.

What has an IQ of 375? Poland
Did you hear about the Polish fish? It drowned.
How does a JAP (Jewish American Princess) get exercise? “Waitress”
(waving arms).
Sigmund Freud
12 HUMOR: JOKES 109
Humor is one of the most enigmatic topics and has been of interest to our
greatest thinkers from Aristotle’s time to the present. Humor has attracted
the attention and interest of many of our greatest minds, from Aristotle and
Kant to Bergson and Freud. It has also fascinated and played an important
part in the work of our greatest writers such as Cervantes, Shakespeare,
Moliere, Swift, and Twain. Curiously, after thousands of years spent trying
to understand why we laugh, there is still a great deal of controversy about
what humor is, what humor does, and why something is funny. Let me deal,
here, with some of the most important theories on humor. I will start with
Aristotle and the “superiority” theory of humor.
SUPERIORITY THEORY OF HUMOR

For Aristotle, comedy (and I will use the terms humor and comedy
interchangeably, though comedy is, technically speaking, a literary form)
is based on “an imitation of men worse than the average,” of people who
are, Aristotle suggested, “ridiculous.” Hobbes, in a classic formulation,
carried the same idea a bit further. As he explained in The Leviathan
(quoted in Berger, An Anatomy of Humor (1993:2), “The passion of
laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden concep-
tion of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of
others, or with our own formerly.” It might seem strange for Hobbes
(1949), the author of The Leviathan, a book on political philosophy, to
write about humor. We now recognize that there is a relationship between
humor and power, perhaps the main concept in political thought, and this
relationship is one that has attracted a considerable amount of attention,
especially in recent years because we now can see that humor can be a
subtle and powerful means of social control by dominant elements in
society. Humor is also, at the same time, a force for resistance by sub-
ordinate elements in society. It is only natural, then, that Hobbes, being a
philosopher of power, was interested in humor and its utility for those in
power. The subtitle of a book, Humor and Society: Resistance and Control,
edited by two British scholars, Chris Powell and George E. Paton (1988),
suggests the “double-edged” sword aspect of humor.
Below I offer two “superiority” jokes—one of which deals with differ-
ences in status and the other with politics, touchy subjects for humorists and
all others. These jokes are not taken from various scholarly books on humor.
A farmer and a professor shared a seat on a train. They found it hard to

converse so, to while away the time, the professor suggested they play a
game of riddles for a dollar a game.
“That’s not fair,” said the farmer. “I’ll play you a dollar against your fifty
cents, then,” said the professor. “Okay,” said the farmer. “You go first,” said
the professor. The farmer thought for a minute and then said, “what animal
has three legs when it walks and two when it flies?” The professor thought
for a moment, and then said “I give up.” He handed the farmer a dollar.
“What’s the answer?” asked the professor. “I don’t know,” said the farmer,
handing the professor fifty cents.
A man is hitchhiking when a car pulls up. The driver asks, “Are you a
Republican?” “No,” says the hitchhiker. “Sorry,” says the driver who pulls
away. Ten minutes later another car pulls over and the driver asks the
hitchhiker, “are you a Republican?” “No,” says the hitchhiker. “Sorry,”
says the driver who pulls away. The hitchhiker decides to change his tactics.
When a car pulls over ten minutes later, the driver—a beautiful young
blonde woman—asks “Are you a Republican?” “Yes,” says the hitchhiker.
“Get in,” says the driver. As the car pulls away, the hitchhiker looks at the
beautiful driver. “Amazing,” he thinks to himself, “I’ve only been a
Republican for five minutes and I already want to screw someone.”
INCONGRUITY THEORY OF HUMOR

The most widely accepted of the explanations of humor is known as the
incongruity theory of humor which argues that all humor involves
some kind of a difference between what one expects and what one
gets. The term “incongruity” has many different meanings—inconsis-
tent, not harmonious, lacking propriety and not conforming, so there
are a number of possibilities hidden in the term. Incongruity theories
involve the intellect, though they may not seem to at first sight for we
have to recognize an incongruity before we can laugh at one (though
this recognition process takes place very quickly and is probably done
subconsciously).
Incongruity theorists would argue that superiority theories are really
special forms of incongruity. Thus the jokes about the farmer and profes-
sor and the Democratic hitchkiker really turn on incongruities, reflected in
the punch line, and not examples of superiority, per se.
12 HUMOR: JOKES 111
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF HUMOR

Probably the most controversial theory of humor, the psychoanalytic theory
of humor, is based on the work of Sigmund Freud. This theory of humor
argues that humor is masked aggression (often of a sexual nature) which
gives us gratifications we desperately crave. As Freud wrote in his classic
book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1963c:101):
And here at last we can understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service
of their purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether
lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way.
Freud tells us we get pleasure from smutty jokes, because women will not
tolerate “undisguised sexuality,” so we mask our sexual aggressiveness by
humor. We also derive pleasure camouflaging our aggression and hostility
(and thus evading the strictures of our superegos) or regressing to child-
like stages, among other things. His analysis of humor devotes a good deal
of attention to the formal or structural properties of jokes. It is not only
their subjects that are important for Freud, but also the forms and the
techniques they employ, such as wordplay, condensation, and displace-
ment. He includes many wonderful Jewish jokes in his book on jokes, and
also comments on the remarkable amount of self-criticism found in jokes
which Jews tell about themselves. “Incidentally,” he wrote, “I do not
know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to
such a degree of its own character.” His use of the word “fun” is impor-
tant. He did not regard Jewish jokes as masochistic. Just the opposite.
Jewish people are not the only ones to make fun of themselves, I might
point out. We find self-ridicule in many groups Here are some Jewish jokes
from the “shtetl” period from Freud’s book:
Two Jews meet in the neighborhood bath house. “Have you taken a bath?
“What?” asked the other. “Is one missing?”
The bridegroom was most disagreeably surprised when the bride was intro-
duced to him and drew the broker on one side and whispered his remon-
strances. “Why have you brought me here?” he asked reproachfully. “She’s
ugly and old, she squints and has bad teeth and bleary eyes . . . ” “You
needn’t lower your voice,” interrupted the broker, “she’s deaf as well.”
A Jew noticed the remains of some food in another’s beard. “I can tell what
you had to eat yesterday.” “Well, tell me.” “Lentils, then.” “Wrong: the day
before yesterday.”
This “fun” which the Jewish people make of themselves, I would

argue, is connected to their social marginality in every country except
Israel and is, in truth, an effective means of countering and dealing
with the difficulties Jewish people have faced in trying to live in
societies which have frequently been very hostile to Jewish people. It
might be argued that since humor is an effective way of keeping in
touch with reality, Jewish humor has been intimately connected with
Jewish survival. There is, we can see here, an important social dimen-
sion to humor. It is not some kind of an idle and trivial matter but
generally enables people to gain valuable insights into social and
political matters.
This is not a Pipe drawing

12 HUMOR: JOKES 113
PARADOX AND META-COMMUNICATION THEORY OF HUMOR

The final theory of humor I will consider might be described as a
conceptual (or even semiotic) theory. It argues that humor is best
understood as dealing with curiosities connected to communication,
paradox, play, and the resolution of logical problems. This, at least, is
the argument of many cognitive theorists (though Freud also con-
cerned himself with cognitive jokes which suggests that he had cogni-
tion covered in his psychoanalytic theory of humor). Let me offer an
example from the writings of William Fry, a psychiatrist who worked
with Gregory Bateson at one time, which focuses upon paradox and
humor. Fry writes in his book Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor
(1963:153):
During the unfolding of humor, one is suddenly confronted by an explicit-

implicit reversal when the punch line is delivered. The reversal helps distin-
guish humor from play, dreams, etc. . . . But the reversal also has the unique
effect of forcing upon the humor participants an internal redefining of
reality. Inescapably the punch line combines communication and meta-
communication. Thus, at one stroke, the punch line in jokes gives us
information which, if the joke is a good one, tells us about the world, strikes
us as funny and functions as a meta-communication (that tells us that what
we have heard is “unreal”).
Here is a joke from Sweet Madness:
A man enters a bakery shop and orders a cake baked in the shape of the
alphabet letter “ess.” The next day he calls for the cake, opens the box to see
it and complains “But I meant a capital ‘ess’ (S).” The baker apologizes and
promises a capital “ess” for the next day. When the promised time arrives,
the man returns to the shop, receives his cake, opens the box, sees that the
cake is truly an “S,” and eats it.
Fry discusses the joke and points out that the fact that we are told that the
story about the cake is a joke puts a “play frame” around the events and
precipitates a paradox. It is fantastic because he will not eat the cake with a
small “ess” but eats the cake when it is a capital “S.” But it is not that
fantastic because, as Fry asks, “what are cakes for?”
WHY WE LAUGH VS WHAT MAKES US LAUGH

I make a distinction between why we laugh—which is the concern of the
thinkers I have discussed—and what makes us laugh—that is, the techni-
ques of humor that can be found in jokes, theatrical comedies, and all
kinds of other humorous texts. I make a distinction between the comic,
the literary form of humor, and the tragic, in the chart below:
The Comic The Tragic
Freedom Determinism
Optimism Pessimism
Chance Inevitability
Survival Destruction
The Social The Personal
Integration Separation
Low Status High Status
Lowly Characters Elevated Characters
Pleasure Pain
Cathexis Catharsis
Cathexis involves a release of pent-up energy and often has a libidinal/

sexual aspect that is life-affirming and celebratory while catharsis involves a
purging of the emotions. Comedies end in weddings, while in tragedies,
which involve the fall of great people, the stage is often littered with dead
bodies—as in Hamlet. In the application that follows, you will have the
opportunity to determine what makes the jokes I offer funny.
APPLICATION: THE COMEDY CALCULATOR EXPERIMENT

What makes us laugh? That is a question that has been of interest to me for
many years. Taking a hint from Freud’s book on humor, which discusses, in
passing, some techniques of humor, I made a content analysis of all the joke
books, comic novels, humorous plays, books of comic strips and cartoons,
and so on, looking, at all times, for what techniques generated the humor in
these texts. What I discovered was that even in relatively simple texts like
jokes, it was often possible to find three or four techniques at work that
made the joke funny. I came up with forty-five techniques of humor, which
12 HUMOR: JOKES 115
I discussed in several of my books, An Anatomy of Humor (1993) and The

Art of Comedy Writing (1997). I also have written a book on the way
people from different disciplines see humor, Blind Men and Elephants and
two books on Jewish humor: The Genius of the Jewish Joke and Jewish Jesters.
I came up with forty-five techniques of humor and realized, very
quickly, that they all could fit under four classifications: humor based on
language, humor based on logic, humor based on identity, and a fourth
category I called “humor based on action” but which may deserve a better
term. My list of the categories and techniques of humor follows:
Language Logic Identity Action
Allusion Absurdity Before/After Chase

Bombast Accident Burlesque Slapstick
Definition Analogy Caricature Speed
Exaggeration Catalogue Eccentricity
Facetiousness Coincidence Embarrassment
Insults Comparison Exposure
Infantilism Disappointment Grotesque
Irony Ignorance Imitation
Misunderstanding Mistakes Impersonation
Over literalness Repetition Mimicry
Puns/Wordplay Reversal Parody
Repartee Rigidity Scale
Ridicule Theme and Variation Stereotype
Sarcasm Unmasking
Satire
FORTY-FIVE TECHNIQUES OF HUMOR CLASSIFIED

This chart of the techniques of humor in alphabetical order enables us
to discern the various techniques found in jokes and other humorous texts
and thus get a better idea of how the text generates humor. Using the
techniques I describe as the “comedy calculator experiment,” though it
really isn’t an experiment in the classical sense of the term. Let me now
“deconstruct” some jokes, to show you how one can use the techniques to
determine how the joke generates mirthful laughter or humor. This dis-
cussion is taking from various places in my writings.
A man goes to Miami for a vacation. After four days he notices he has a tan
all over his body, except for his penis. So the next day he goes to a deserted
area of the beach early in the morning, takes his clothes off and lies down.
He sprinkles sand over himself until all that remains in the sun is his penis.
Two little old ladies walk by on the boardwalk and one notices the penis.
“When I was 20,” she says, “I was scared to death of them. When I was 40,
I couldn’t get enough of them. When I was 60, I couldn’t get one to come
near me . . . and now they’re growing wild on the beach.”
In this joke, we have a number of techniques at work. We have:
Eccentricity—the man must have every bit of his body tanned, even his
penis.
Mistakes—the old lady thinks that penises are growing wild on the
beach.
Exposure—the exhibitionism of the man and the sexual desire of the
woman.
This joke has at least three techniques operating in it and others may find
more. Let me offer another joke here, which has a structure we often hear
in jokes.
The United Nations asks a group of scholars to write a book on Elephants.

The following books are contributed: The French write “The Love Life of
the Elephant.” The English write “The Elephant and English Social
Classes.” The Germans write “A Short Introduction to the Elephant in
Five Volumes.” The Jews write “Elephants and The Jewish Question.”
In this joke we have the following techniques at work:
Stereotypes as the basic technique. Notions about what people from

different countries are like.
Theme and Variation. How the French, Germans, English, etc. differ.
Satire (on the preoccupations of people in different countries)
Finally, let us consider this joke:
A minister returns unexpectedly early to his house and finds the strong smell
of cigar smoke and his wife naked in bed. He looks out the window and sees
a priest smoking a big cigar walking out of the door of his apartment house.
12 HUMOR: JOKES 117
In a jealous rage he picks up the refrigerator and throws it on the priest,

killing him instantly. Then, smitten by remorse he jumps out the window
and kills himself. The next instant, the minister, the priest and a rabbi appear
before an angel at the Pearly Gates. “What happened?” the angel asks the
priest. “I was walking out of this house and a refrigerator fell on me,” said
the priest. “And you?” asks the angel to the minister. “I threw the refrig-
erator on the priest and then felt so bad I killed myself.” “And you?” asks the
angel to the rabbi. “You’ve got me,” says the rabbi. I was minding my own
business . . . smoking a cigar in a refrigerator . . .
Here we start off with
Coincidence. The minister returns early and finds a strong smell of

cigar smoke.
Mistakes. He assumes the priest he sees is the source of the cigar
smoke. Finally,
Facetiousness. Here the rabbi explains that he was minding his own
business, smoking a cigar in a refrigerator . . . a facetious remark.
I have used these three jokes to demonstrate that jokes can be quite
complicated and use a number of different techniques to generate
humor and make us laugh.
HUMOROUS TEXTS TO ANALYZE

Now I offer a number of humorous texts for my readers to “decon-
struct,” to see if they can identify the basic techniques in the joke that
generates the humor. When I taught courses that involved comedy
writing, I’d discuss the forty-five techniques and then have students, in
groups of three, see if they could determine which techniques were
used in various jokes and humorous texts I gave them to work on. In
“deconstructing” these jokes, see if you can determine which techni-
ques are used and whether one technique is more important the
others.
Jack eating rotten cheese did say,

Like Samson I my thousands slay;
I vow, quoth Roger, so you do.
And with the self-same weapon, too.
This comic poem was written by Benjamin Franklin. Now for some jokes
of varying degrees of complexity. Here are some of Radio Erevan jokes
which take the form of someone calling Radio Erevan and asking a ques-
tion and then getting an answer from Radio Erevan:
A listener asks “Dear Radio Erevan, would it be possible to introduce

socialism into the Sahara?” Radio Erevan answers “Yes, it would be possible
to introduce socialism into the Sahara, but after the first five-year plan, the
Sahara will have to import sand.”
A listener asks “Dear Radio Erevan, could we have the Mafia in Russia?
Radio Erevan answers, “Dear listener, we already have the Mafia except in
Russia we call it the government.”
Caller: “Dear Radio Erevan, is it true that Comrade Gasparov won
10,000 rubles in the state lottery?”
Radio Erevan: “Yes, it is true! But it was not Comrade Gasparov but
Academician Smirnov. And it was not 10,000 rubles but 5,000 rubles. And
he didn’t win it in the state lottery but lost it gambling.”
Finally, another joke that you might find amusing.
St. Peter is busy minding the gate to heaven when he is called

away. He asks Jesus to mind the gate for a while. While Jesus is
there an old Italian man appears. “I’m looking for my son,” says
the man. “I loved him very much and he disappeared. I’ve been
all over the world and asked many people if they had seen him.
Everyone said they had heard of him but never had met him . . . ”
With tears welling in his eyes Jesus opens his arms and exclaims
“Father.” The old man embraces him and cries “Pinocchio.”
The question arises—does finding out what techniques are used in jokes
and other humorous texts “destroy” them or does it enhance your appre-
ciating for how remarkable these texts are. Some critics of my forty-five
techniques have suggested that while the operation may be successful—in
that you learn how these jokes work—the patient, that is the joke, always
dies.
CHAPTER 13
Intertextuality: Parody
Abstract The concept is defined and used to interpret the “1984”

Macintosh commercial. The work of M. M. Bakhtin is discussed in some
detail and the implications of his theory about intertextuality for discourse
theory are explored. The relationship between intertextuality and ideology/
politics is dealt with in the work of Norman Fairclough, who considered the
role texts play in contemporary political life.
Application Parody is defined and discussed as an example of explicit

intertextuality. It is suggested that parody can involve ridiculing a style of
authorship, a genre, or a specific text. In addition, other humorous
techniques are often used in parodies. An exercise using parody is offered
to readers.
Keywords Bakhtin Intertextuality Ideology Parody
Words have histories. They have been in other people’s mouths and on other
people’s pens. They have circulated through other Discourses and within
other institutions. They have been part of specific historical events and
episodes. Words bring with them as potential situated meanings all the
situated meanings they have picked up in history and in other settings and
Discourses.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_13
Producers and receivers may know and use only some of the potential
situated meanings. They may not activate them or only partially activate
them. But such meanings are always potentially open to being activated or
more fully activated. They are like a virus that may remain inactive for a long
while, but that is always there and potentially able to infect people, situa-
tions, social practices, and Discourses with new situated meanings (ironi-
cally, the meanings are actually old, but previously unactivated, or only
partially activated in the Discourse under consideration). This the “bite”
of theories of “intertextuality.” Any text (oral or written) is infected with the
meanings (at least as potential) of all the other texts in which its words are
comported. Studying the meaning potential of texts, in this sense, is an
important part of discourse analysis.
James Paul Gee, Discourse Analysis: Theory
and Method. (1999:54–55)
Every extra-artistic prose discourse—in any of its forms, quotidian, rheto-

rical, scholarly—cannot fail to be oriented toward the “already uttered,”
the “already known,” the “common opinion” and so forth. The dialogic
orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is of course a property of
any discourse.
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (1981:279)
Intertextuality is an important concept, because it explains so much that

happens in communication. Intertextuality, as its name suggests, argues that
texts of all kinds, from conversations to novels and films, borrow from one
another, either consciously or unconsciously. For example, the famous
Macintosh commercial “1984” was consciously connected to George
Orwell’s famous anti-utopian novel, 1984 and, I would suggest, intertex-
tually to the biblical story of David and Goliath. According to intertextual
theory, all texts borrow from other texts—sometimes stylistic elements from
other texts and in some cases plots and characters and even dialogue from
other texts. The theory behind intertextuality is found in the writings
Bakhtin (1895–1975), who wrote in his book The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays (1981:280):
The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a

future answer-word. It provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures
itself on the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the
13 INTERTEXTUALITY: PARODY 121
already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has
not been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering
word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue.
Norman Fairclough, a British discourse analyst, suggests in his book

Discourse and Social Change that the term “intertextuality” was first
used by Julia Kristeva, a French literary theorist and psychoanalyst, in
her discussions (in the late sixties) of the work of Bakhtin. His theories
are behind what we call “intertextuality.”
Conversation theorists have used intertextual theory to explain how
conversations work, and the way what has been said by the conver-
sants and what they anticipate will be said, shapes the behavior of
people having a conversation. We can take this theory and use it to
understand how artistic texts are created. Bakhtin deals with the
relationships that exist among these kinds of texts, focusing upon
the matter of literary “quotation” (which is another word for inter-
textuality) in the Middle Ages. He writes in The Dialogic Imagination
(1981:69):
The role of the other’s word was enormous at that time; there were
quotations that were openly and reverently emphasized as such, or that
were half-hidden, completely hidden, half-conscious, unconscious, cor-
rect, intentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted and so forth. The
boundary lines between someone else’s speech and one’s own speech were
flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused. Certain
types of texts were constructed like mosaics out of the texts of others. . . .
One of the best authorities on medieval parody . . . states outright that the
history of medieval literature and its Latin literature in particular “is the
history of appropriation, re-working and imitation of someone else’s
property”—or as we would say, of another’s language, another’s style,
another’s word.
This “appropriation” of the work of others that occurred in the Middle

Ages is no different from what happens today. That’s because many
inhabitants of the Western world, especially in this age of globalization,
share a common cultural heritage that informs the work of creative
artists in all media and is reflected in texts even when the artists didn’t
make a conscious decision to “quote” from or borrow from other texts
or sources.
If Bakhtin is correct, all texts are influenced by texts that preceded

them, even if the persons creating the texts are not aware that they are
“borrowing,” to various extents, plots, themes, camera shots (in films),
language, or anything else. This is because, in part, we share a common
cultural heritage and this heritage shapes the creation of texts and our
understanding of them.
Norman Fairclough expands this notion of the significance of intertex-
tuality to deal with history and ideology. He writes in Discourse and Social
Change (1992/1993:102):
The salience of the concept of intertextuality in the framework I am developing

accords with my focus upon discourse and social change. Kristeva observes that
intertextuality implies “the insertion of history (society) into a text and this text
into history” (1986:39). By “the insertion of history into a text,” she means
that the text absorbs and is built out of texts from the past (texts being the
major artefacts that constitute history). By the “insertion of the text into
history,” she means that the text responds to, reaccentuates, and reworks
past texts, and in so doing helps to make history and contributes to wider
processes of change, as well as anticipating and trying to shape subsequent
texts. This inherent historicity of texts enables them to take on the major roles
they have in contemporary society at the leading edge of social and cultural
change. The rapid transformation and restructuring of textual traditions and
orders of discourse is a strong contemporary phenomenon, which suggests
that intertextuality ought to be a major focus in discourse analysis.
Fairclough calls our attention to the role that texts play in contemporary
social, cultural, and political life which means that intertexuality now has a
much more important significance, since all texts are connected to all
other texts. Intertextuality, if Fairclough is correct, because of the role it
takes in shaping texts, helps make history; that is, it has revolutionary
potentialities. For Fairclough, texts are of major importance since they
are, as he puts it, “at the leading edge of social and cultural change.” If you
think about it, a relatively small number of texts have helped shaped our
consciousness in the western world. I am talking about texts such as the
Bible, the Koran, the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de
Saussure, C. S. Peirce, and a dozen or so other works. It is the task of what
we call critical discourse analysis to help us understand how these texts and
others, of lesser importance perhaps but still important, achieve their goals
and have had such a profound impact.
13 INTERTEXTUALITY: PARODY 123
APPLICATION: PARODY
Intertextuality occurs when a text makes reference to another text and
“borrows” from it. Neal R. Norrick defines intertextuality in his essay
“Intertextuality in Humor” (Humor, 1989, Vol. 2, No.2, 117–118):
Intertextuality occurs any time one text suggests or requires reference to

some other identifiable text or stretch of discourse, spoken or written.
Scholarly writing seems to make its intertextual references as accurate and
conspicuous as possible through documentation, while everyday conversa-
tion borrows freely from sources often left unnamed, and literature delights
in disguise, obscure allusion, and parody.
Parody is one of the most frequently used examples of conscious inter-

textuality. Parody relies on the addressee in the communication process
recognizing the message (parody) is similar to some original text to get the
most out of the humor, though in some parodies, the exaggeration and
other comedic qualities of the parody itself is enough to please audiences.
I think of parody as a technique of humor, which is based on the
category of humor I list as identity humor. I suggest there are three
kinds of parody:
1. ridiculing a style of authorship (including visual arts),

2. ridiculing a genre (such as a soap opera), or
3. ridiculing specific text (such as Star Wars).
Let me offer some examples, with the caveat that in some cases, genres
have a particular style so the separation between genre and style is not
always easy to make. In addition to ridiculous imitation, parodies often use
other techniques of humor such as exaggeration, definition, and absurdity.
Parody is generally defined as a humorous imitation of a well-known
genre, a text, or a distinctive writing style (think Hemingway) but I
would also add images such as caricatures as a kind of parody. Parody
can make us of other techniques such as insult, exaggeration and satire.
Some theorists suggest that satire focuses on social and political phenom-
ena while parody is essentially cultural, but I see them as very close and
suggest that many parodies have a satirical element in them.
According to Bakhtin, we have had parodies all through history. These
parodies were all comic and focused upon laughter and a festive approach
to life. They were seen as the “world’s second revelation” as revealed in

play and laughter. Bakhtin adds that there were parodies of church dramas,
debates, and fairy tales. There were animal epics as well as carnival rituals
and spectacles. These parodies were in opposition to official Christian
church doctrine and culture. And this parodic sensibility lives on in con-
temporary culture, except that it is politics and culture that are the main
focus of parodists now.
In some cases, one finds different kind of parodies mixed together as,
for example, in Woody Allen’s parody of college bulletin course descrip-
tions, shown below. Allen parodies both the genre of the college bulletin
course descriptions and the style found in that genre: the brevity and high
seriousness found in them. He writes in Getting Even (1978:42):
INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
The theory of human behavior. Why some men are called “lovely indivi-
duals” and why there are others you just want to pinch. Is there a split
between mind and body, and if so, which is better to have? Aggression and
rebellion are discussed. (Students particularly interested in these aspects of
psychology are advised to take one of the Winter Term courses:
Introduction to Hostility, Advanced Hatred, Theoretical Foundations of
Loathing.) Special consideration is given to a study of consciousness as
opposed to unconsciousness, with many helpful hints on how to remain
unconscious.
There are also many parodies of Ernest Hemingway’s and William

Faulkner’s style of writing because they are so distinctive. There is a yearly
contest of Hemingway parodies and a book of some of the better parodies
of his work. Parody, then, is a very useful technique of humor, which
explains why humorists make so much use of it. We take pleasure in the
aggression found in parodies, as texts, genres and styles of writing are
imitated and ridiculed but feel no guilt.
An Exercise Using Parody

Based on what you’ve learned about parody from the discussion of the
subject in this chapter and the examples I’ve offered, write a short parody
of a genre (Woody Allen parodied college catalogue course descriptions),
a style of writing (for example, Hemingway’s style) or a specific text (a film
or television show).
PART III
Concepts
CHAPTER 14
Ritual: Smoking
Abstract Conventional understandings of ritual are discussed and the

importance of ritual to religion and to society are explored. The ideas of
Emile Durkheim, as delineated in his classic The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, are examined, along with psychoanalytic approaches to
neurotic rituals known as obsessive compulsive behavior. Freud’s compar-
ison between religion and obsessional neuroses is described.
Application Cigarette smoking is interpreted as ritualistic and the various

components of the ritual of smoking are discussed along with social codes
connected to it and its functions for smokers. A learning exercise involving
ritual is described.
Keywords Ritual Religion Obsessive-compulsive behavior Functions
Many sociologists, following Merton (1957: 131ff) use the term ritualist
for one who performs external gestures without inner commitment to the
ideas and values being expressed. . . . Ritual, defined as a routinized act
diverted from its normal function, subtly becomes a despised form of
communication. Other symbolic acts accurately convey information
about the intentions and commitments of the actor: ritual does not.
The ritualist becomes one who performs external gestures which imply
commitment to a particular set of values, but he is inwardly withdrawn,
dried out, and uncommitted. This is a distractingly partisan use of the

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_14
term. For it derives from the assumptions of the anti-ritualists in the long
history of religious revivalism.
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols. (1973:19–20)
Ritual: A form of behavior prescribed by custom, law, rule or regulation.

Among many primitive peoples ritual is thought to be particularly pleasing
to the gods and deviations from the established ritual are severely punished.
Ritual is considered especially important in church, fraternal, governmental
and formal social activities; in admitting new members, in baptism, in
initiation, in induction into office, in introducing members to each other
or to the group. It is found in ceremonial dances, feasts, sacrifices, burials
and many other established forms of activities. Ritual man refer to the
ceremonies governing such activities. It may include prayers, testimonies,
standing, bowing, kneeling, clasping the hands, marching, singing, carrying
a cross, staff or other insignia.
Oscar Wesley in Henry Pratt Fairchild, ed. Dictionary of Sociology
and Related Sciences. (1967:262)
Conventionally, we understand ritual to mean several things. First, it often

deals with what we think of as involving “the holy” or “the sacred.” We
are reminded of ritual in religious services, where certain actions and
religious performances are repeated over and over again in the service
and the service is repeated again over the course of a year. We also think
of ritual from a psychoanalytic perspective. There it can mean anything
from relatively mindless habits to obsessive compulsive behavior.
In his book Symbols & Civilization, Ralph Ross discusses the impor-
tance of ritual to religion. He defines ritual as (1962:182–183):
the prescribed and formal acting out of a ceremony, usually repeated in

exactly the same way on specified occasions. A system of belief, even one that
has a place for God, is a philosophy, not a religion, unless it explains, or is
expressed, in a ritual. But a ritual without a system of belief may still be a
religion. And it is in ritual—especially in ritual as symbolic—that much of
the social function of religion can be found.
He adds that it is likely that primitive religions consisted mostly of rites

and that theology and myths developed later. Myths would be a symbo-
lization of rites and theology, an explanation of rites and myths. What is
important to recognize, Ross explains, is that rituals are connected to the
relationship between people, nature and society and that (1962:185)
14 RITUAL: SMOKING 129
“ritual celebrates the major events in human life, accords them social recog-
nition, and relates man and society to nature.” In so doing, ritual helps
people integrate into society.
Ross turns his attention to social rituals and the role they play in our
everyday lives. As he explains about ritual (1962:186):
It often commemorates historic events in the life of the group or the

development of its religion. The Jews, for example, celebrate their delivery
from bondage in Egypt and the making, through Abraham, of a covenant
with God. These historic incidents are commemorated and kept alive in
memory, as traditions that foster the continuity and uniqueness of the
group. After all, a group, like a man, is what it is in great part because of
its remembered history. Ritual, then, chiefly expresses celebration, consecra-
tion, dedication, and commemoration.
Ritual, we see, plays an important role in our religions and in our societies.
It plays a role in the groups we belong to, religious, social, and political,
and thus in our establishing our identities.
Emile Durkheim offers an insight into the relationship that exists
between ritual and religion in his book The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life (1965:121):
Since every religion is made up of intellectual conceptions and ritual practices,

we must deal successively with the beliefs and rites which compose the
totemic religion. These two elements of religious life are too closely con-
nected with each other to allow any radical separation. In principle, the cult is
derived from beliefs, yet it reacts upon them; the myth is frequently modelled
after the rite in order to account for it. On the other hand, there are beliefs
which are clearly manifested only through the rites which express them.
So where we find ritual, we generally find religion or institutions that have

a religions dimension to them.
Psychoanalytic theory is also interested in ritual since, in some cases, an
obsessive attachment to ritual is a signifier of neurosis. In his article “Obsessive
Acts and Religious Practices” (in Philip Rieff, Freud: Character and Culture),
Freud explains (1963b:17):
I am certainly not the first to be struck by the resemblance between what

are called obsessive acts in neurotics and those religious observances by
means of which the faithful give expression to their piety. The name
“ceremonial,” which has been given to certain of these obsessive acts, is

evidence of this. . . . Persons who are addicted to obsessive acts or cere-
monials belong to the same class as those who suffer from obsessive
thoughts and ideas, obsessive impulses and the like, and form with
them a definite clinical groups, the customary term for which is obses-
sional neurosis.
These neurotic ceremonials—we can use term ritual for them—are always
carried out in the same or in a “methodically varies” way and performed
with great conscientiousness by obsessive compulsives. Obsessive acts
develop from ceremonials in Freud’s thinking. He notices, also, the simi-
larity between religious rites and neurotic ceremonials. Religions, he
believes, force us to renounce certain instinctual urges—generally of a
sexual nature.
This leads Freud to make an interesting comparison between reli-
gions and obsessional neuroses. He writes (1963b:25):
In view of the resemblances and analogies one might venture to regard

the obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart to the formation
of a religion, to describe this neurosis as a private religious system, and
religion as a universal obsessional neurosis. The essential resemblance
would be in the fundamental renunciation of the satisfaction of inherent
instincts and the chief difference in the nature of these instincts, which
in the neurosis are exclusively sexual, but in religion are of egoistic
origin.
I should point out that Freud is using the term “ego” in a special way,
based on his theory of the endless conflict in the psyche between the forces
of the id (desire), ego (moderation and relation to the world) and super-
ego (conscience and guilt). It is the function of the ego to try to balance
the id and superego and prevent either from becoming dominant.
There is, I suggest, a difference between certain daily rituals that people
follow and obsessive compulsive rituals, which dominate the lives of those
afflicted with the obsessional compulsive disorder (OCD) as it is described
in psychoanalytic literature. These daily rituals are useful to us because
they relieve us of the need to make decisions, all the time, about many of
the things that are part of our routines. It is to one of the most harmful of
our daily routines that I would like to turn in the applications—cigarette
smoking.
APPLICATION: CIGARETTE SMOKING

Fifty or sixty years ago we didn’t realize that smoking causes cancer. Now
that science has provided a link between cigarette smoking, people can
quit smoking and others never start smoking. Quitting smoking is difficult
because nicotine is very addictive. What interests me about smoking is how
ritualistic it is. I would argue that many seemingly simple activities are,
actually, quite complex and involved. Let’s take, for the object of our
analysis, what is unfortunately a common activity, or, as we shall see, a
series of activities—lighting up and smoking a cigarette. This ritual is
something that hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people,
do every day for any one of a number of reasons. And yet, like so many
things they do in everyday life, they give relatively little thought and pay
hardly any attention to what they are doing and how they are doing it.
From my point of view, smoking is a ritualized activity that, like many
rituals, is composed of a number of smaller acts which are the fundamental
units of the ritual. We could call them “ritualemes” and describe them as
the basic elements of the smoking ritual. We will start by breaking the
activity up into its ritualemes or fundamental acts. What I will do here is
list each activity in a typical ritual process known as “having a smoke” or
“smoking.” The acts are listed in order of occurrence: We could actually
break some of the ritualemes down into smaller units (micro-acts in the
ritual) but the list below is adequate for our purposes.
1. Taking a pack of cigarettes

2. Opening it
3. Selecting a cigarette
4. Putting a cigarette in the mouth
5. Returning pack to pocket or purse
6. Taking a lighter or packet of matches
7. Lighting the cigarette—puffing to start tobacco burning
8. Returning the lighter to pocket or purse
9. Puffing on cigarette
10. Taking the cigarette out of one’s mouth to exhale, flick ashes, etc.
11. Grinding out the butt in an ashtray or flicking the butt away.
We see that there are nearly a dozen micro-acts or ritualemes involved in

smoking a cigarette. These acts can be subsumed under four different
categories: selecting, lighting, smoking, and disposing. The actual smoking
of a cigarette occurs at the end of a relatively long sequence of acts which

leads to the consumption of the cigarette, and it is all these little acts which
give the smoking of cigarettes gratifications beyond that of just puffing
away on burning tobacco and getting a nicotine fix.
Along with these eleven ritual acts, as we smoke we must be aware of
various social codes connected with smoking. For example, people smok-
ing in company will often ask people if they would like to have a cigarette.
In recent years, now that many smokers have been made conscious of the
fact that smoking irritates people and that second-hand smoke also causes
cancer in non-smokers, smokers will ask if it is permissible to smoke. The
rules of etiquette also suggest that men should light cigarettes for women.
There are many functions connected with smoking; it is an activity
which gives people something to do with their hands to relieve boredom
or anxiety, it helps confer a kind of identity (smoker/nonsmoker) and also
aids in giving a person an image. The brand of cigarette people smoke is a
“message” they send to their friends and others about who they are and
how they see themselves. Cigarette advertisers cultivate different images of
people who purchase their brand by the advertising they make. This means
that people can cultivate different images of themselves by choosing from
readymade images and identities connected to smoking a particular brand
of cigarette. Ironically, Marlboro, once a ladies cigarette, has used rugged
cowboys to become identified with nature, the outdoors, and that kind of
thing, while Virginia Slims projects an image of sophisticated, adult
femininity. Cigarettes may also help assuage oral needs in people and
function as a kind of reverse (in that they are cancer creating) substitute
for the mother’s breast.
Smokers can also cultivate a sense of the demonic and magical, as they
transform themselves into smoke-snorting monsters, fire-breathing dragons,
etc. An examination of the four categories under which the eleven acts
involved in smoking can be grouped reveals that smoking also is connected
to power urges, and smoking may be a kind of power-enhancing or redeem-
ing substitute for people who, in fact, have little power. (This thesis explains
why working-class people are more addicted to smoking than professional
people.)
The fact that all of these messages and functions are petty and trivial is
beside the point. What we find is that the various kinds of acts involved in
smoking involve different kinds and forms of power: decision-making,
summoning fire (a kind of magic), destroying or wasting conspicuously,
and relegating ashes to the ash heap and butts to an ash tray. If we adopt
the dramatic metaphor and see our actions as a kind of “theater,” in which
we are the heroes (or, at least the leading men and women), smoking can
be likened to a performance one puts on, involving a number of props—
matches or lighters, cigarettes, ashtrays, etc. This performance involves a
variety of physical actions:
1. Opening
2. Picking out with thumb and fingers
3. Placing object to lips
4. Scratching (matches) or pressing (lighter)
5. Sucking
6. Blowing
7. Flicking
8. Pressing or grinding.
All of these actions can be done in different ways, with different “styles.”
In addition there is the matter of where the cigarette is placed in the
mouth (left side, center, right side), the angle at which it “dangles,” how
puffs are taken and how the smoke exhaled, the length of the cigarette, its
color, whether it has a filter tip or not, how the cigarette is held, and so on.
What is interesting is that smokers usually develop a routine and style of
smoking and keep it for as long as they smoke, so that once the act or the
performance is created, the actors keep on playing the role until they die or
stop smoking. Because smoking involves so many different acts and confers,
in subtle ways, so many psychic gratifications on the smoker-performer, it is
hard to stop smoking. The addiction is more than physical; it is also
psychological—nobody likes to leave show-biz! This analysis suggests that
in order to stop people from smoking, we must find substitute rituals, which
allow smokers to “perform” somehow, and which take care of power needs
they have. That is why chewing gum is so unsatisfactory. It is much too
elemental and has connotations of childishness.
An Exercise Involving Ritual

Find some other ritual that is common to our everyday lives and break it
down into the various micro-acts that one finds in the ritual. When
looking at these micro-acts, what do we learn about the function of the
ritual? Some topics to consider are: getting dressed, having breakfast,
brushing our teeth, cooking a meal, and so on.
CHAPTER 15
Lifestyles: Grid-Group Theory
Abstract A discussion on the importance of language to our sense of self

is explored by discourse theorists. This is followed by a description of the
work of socio-linguist Basil Bernstein, who argues that there are two
basic codes that shape the way people talk, based largely on their socio-
economic status. Next we find an analysis of the work of the English
social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who argues that there are four
“lifestyles” in modern societies, which shape our behavior in numerous
ways: hierarchical elitists, egalitarians, competitive individualists, and
fatalists. She suggests that consumption is not based on personal taste
but on imperatives, generally masked, generated by the lifestyle to which
people belong.
Application It is suggested that the four lifestyles also determine the shows
people watch on television and movies they see, and many other choices they
make. A chart showing how lifestyles influence our popular culture and media
preferences is shown. Readers are asked to fill in topics not dealt with in the
chart.
Keywords Mary Douglas Lifestyles Consumption Popular Culture

Media

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_15
Is his mother an Amazon?”

“Oh, my dear, yes. In her prime she’s been something—sacrificed and
eaten most of her children, castrated Herakles, netted and boiled four
husbands. The chorus sings a complete account of her career while she has
her ear to the keyhole. But I see it’s all far above your head. You don’t grasp
it at all. Not that I do, myself. I would much rather not write the play at all.”
“Then why not drop it?”
“How can I, dear? Don’t be too obtuse. I must know who I am, mustn’t I?”
“Surely your own play isn’t going to tell you?”
“Of course not, dear; it’s the critics who’ll tell me. At the moment I
don’t exist; I don’t even know what to become. But once my play’s done, I’ll
know. One critic will say: ‘Harold Snatogen reveals himself as an embodi-
ment of the fashionable anti-Moon Goddess revival.’ Another will say: ‘In
Snatogen we see what Hegel called. . . . ” And then he’ll tell what Hegel
called. After that it will be quite simple: I shall become the most flattering
definition. You see nowadays you can’t hope to do everything yourself. You
produce the little boys, as it were, and the critics tell you what you’re made
of. Once you’ve been told, you can just sail ahead, being yourself. It’s the
first little boy that matters. (pp. 217, 218)
Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity. Vanguard Press. 1955.
Caricature of Aaron Wildavsky (Caricature

of Aaron Wildavsky by A.A. Berger)
Who we are and how we see ourselves, discourse analysts tell us, is socially
constructed. We’ve been told, in recent years, that gender is socially con-
structed but the same holds true for the various demographic categories that
marketers use to categorize us, such as our age, religion, race, the languages
we speak, and in which we write, and socio-economic class. Some aspects of
our selves are easily changed. If we have black hair we can dye it red or blonde
15 LIFESTYLES: GRID-GROUP THEORY 137
or whatever color we wish to. If we are short we can wear shoes that boost
our height by a couple of inches. We can change our religion and convert
from one religion to another. We can speak in a different language from the
one we learned when we grew up. We can pretend we’re younger than we
really are. And we can change our gender, but that is much more difficult.
Nicola Woods explains the importance of language to our sense of self
in her book Describing Discourse: A Practical Guide to Discourse Analysis.
After discussing the role language plays in various aspects of our lives she
writes (2006:viii):
For language is a social practice—and many would want to say that it is the
defining social practice. Our social relationships are almost wholly realized in
language; language leads us to act and behave in certain ways, and it is a
powerful shaping force in how we think about and construct the world we
live in. It would certainly be a mistake to believe that our social practices consist
of nothing but language; but it is equally certain that the way we use language is
an essential part of our human experience. It may even be through the social
practice of language that we actually “construct” ourselves as we negotiate
through life.
If Woods is correct, it is language that we use to form our sense of self and,
though this is something of an oversimplification, we speak ourselves into
existence. The English socio-linguist Basil Bernstein has shown that there
are two dominant language codes found in England—what he calls the
elaborated and the restricted codes—that shape the way people in different
socio-economic classes talk and think.
These codes are shown below. The chart is based on material in his
writings.
Elaborated code Restricted code
Middle classes and above Working classes

Grammatically complex language Grammatically simple language
Varied vocabulary Uniform vocabulary
Complex sentence structure Short, repetitive sentence structure
Careful use of adjective and adverbs Little use of adjectives and adverbs
High level of conceptualization Low level conceptualization
Logical Emotional
Use of qualifications Little use of qualifications
Users aware of code Users unaware of code.
We can see that there is a great deal of difference between the elaborated
and restricted codes and each has both positive and negative aspects.
The English social-anthropologist Mary Douglas developed what is
known as grid-group theory, which has a great deal to say about who we
are and who we think we are. As this theory evolved, other scholars
adopted it and worked with it, such as the political scientist Aaron
Wildavsky, who wrote a book with Douglas. He was interested in grid-
group theory because it helped him understand people’s political beha-
vior. He explained grid-group theory as follows in his essay “Conditions
for a Pluralist Democracy or Cultural Pluralism Means More Than One
Political Culture in a Country:”
What matters to people is how they should live with other people. The great
questions of social life are “Who am I?” (To what kind of a group do I belong?)
and What should I do? (Are there many or few prescriptions I am expected to
obey?). Groups are strong or weak according to whether they have boundaries
separating them from others. Decisions are taken either for the group as a
whole (strong boundaries) or for individuals or families (weak boundaries).
Prescriptions are few or many indicating the individual internalizes a large or a
small number of behavioral norms to which he or she is bound. By combining
boundaries with prescriptions . . . the most general answers to the questions of
social life can be combined to form four different political cultures, (p. 7)
These two dimensions, Grid and Group, lead to four different lifestyles
depending on whether the group boundaries are strong or weak and
whether there are many or few rules and prescriptions.
Different theorists give members of these lifestyles different names. I
use the names for the lifestyles adopted by Aaron Wildavsky in his work on
political cultures: hierarchical elitists, individualists, egalitarians, and fatal-
ists. Mary Douglas has different names for Egalitarians and Fatalists: she
calls Egalitarians Enclavists and Fatalists Isolates. But they both agree that
the matter of group boundaries and number and kind of rules yield four
lifestyles even if they use different terms for some of them.
Lifestyle Group Boundaries Many or Few Prescriptions
Hierarchical elitist Strong Numerous and varied

Egalitarian (Enclavists) Strong Few
Competitive individualist Weak Few
Fatalist (Isolates) Weak Numerous and varied
Wildavsky explains how these groups are formed. He writes in his

article “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institution” (quoted
in A. A. Berger, (Ed.) Political Culture and Public Opinion 1990:6):
Strong groups with numerous prescriptions that vary with social roles com-
bine to form hierarchical collectivism. Strong groups whose members follow
few prescriptions form an egalitarian culture, a shared life of voluntary con-
sent, without coercion or inequality. Competitive individualism joins few
prescriptions with weak boundaries, thereby encouraging ever new combi-
nations. When groups are weak and prescriptions strong, so that decisions are
made for them by people on the outside, the controlled culture is fatalistic.
I should point out that at times Wildavsky slightly changed the terms he
used for the groups. The important thing is that each of these groups are
formed based on their relationship to group boundaries and number and
kind of rules to which they are subject.
Grid-group theorists assert that people are generally not aware of the
fact that they are in one of Douglas’ “lifestyles” or Wildavsky’s “political
cultures,” but they are aware that they are different from people in other
groups in society, with whom they maintain an antagonistic relationship.
The important thing is that the decisions we make about all kinds of
different things in our everyday lives are shaped, to a considerable extent,
by our grid-group affiliations or lifestyles. In a seminal article she wrote,
“In Defence of Shopping,” Douglas offers some insights into the nature of
each lifestyle (in Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, The Shopping Experience
(1997:19) and points out that an acceptance of one lifestyle involves,
implicitly a rejection of the three other lifestyles. I’ve made this chart
based upon her writings.
Individualist Hierarchical Egalitarian /Enclavist Fatalist/Isolates
High Tech Formal Simplicity Withdrawn

Sporty Traditions Not formal Unpredictable
Arty Established institutions Anti-authoritarian Few friends
Competitive Family network basic Intimate friendships Alienated
Open network Spiritual values
For Douglas and grid-group theorists, there are only four lifestyles and
while each is in competition with the other three, they all need each other
and depend upon each other in order to function. There can be movement
possible between lifestyles, though the fatalists/isolates are generally at the
bottom rung of the economic ladder and rely on luck to escape from their
lifestyle.
What Douglas writes about consumption also relates to our lifestyle
affiliations. She writes (1997:17):
Consumption behavior is continuously and pervasively inspired by cultural

hostility. This argument will reinstate the good sense and integrity of the
consumer. We have to make a radical shift away from thinking about con-
sumption as a manifestation of individual choices. Culture itself is the result of
myriads of individual choices, not primarily between commodities but
between kinds of relationships. The basic choice that a rational individual
has to make is the choice about what kind of a society to live in. According to
that choice, the rest follows. Artefacts are selected to demonstrate that choice.
Food is eaten, clothes are worn, books, music, holidays, all the rest are choices
that conform with the initial choice for a form of society . . . Hostility is
implicit in their selection.
When Douglas uses the term “society” here she means lifestyle. She con-
cludes her article with an elaboration of the role of cultural hostility in her
thinking. She writes (1997:30), “Shopping is agonistic, a struggle to define
not what one is, but what one is not.” That is, we define ourselves as
shoppers and, in general, by not being like people in other lifestyles.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained that concepts are
defined differentially. As he wrote in his Course in General Linguistics,
which I’ve quoted several times in this book (1915/1966:120):
Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content
but negatively with the other terms of the system . . . The most precise
characteristic [of these concepts] is in being what the others are not.
Notice how Saussure’s writings about concepts are similar to what

Douglas wrote about shopping. We can say the same thing about our
sense of who we are. We define ourselves by not being in the other three
lifestyles, even though we may not recognize what lifestyle we belong to,
and on the individual level, being—or trying to be, to the extent we can do
so—what others are not. We can, at times, switch lifestyles, though that is
very difficult for fatalists/isolates.
Pop Culture Cover

APPLICATION: POPULAR CULTURE CHOICES AND LIFESTYLES

When I taught media criticism at San Francisco State University, I used to
play a game with my students that yielded interesting results. I discussed
grid-group theory and the nature of the four lifestyles and then asked my
students, in teams of three students, to determine what texts members of
each of the lifestyles would prefer for certain categories such as songs,
movies, books (fiction and non-fiction), games, and so on. What this
exercise revealed was that my students were able to figure out which
texts members of the four lifestyles should, if they were logical, prefer.
They could also see that if their preferences lined up under one lifestyle,
they were members of that lifestyle—or would like to be once they
graduated from the university and started working.
What follows is a chart based upon what my students assumed members
of each lifestyle would prefer, updated here and there. Some of the texts
are dated and should be replaced with more recent examples. I have also
added some categories for students to decide upon. After the students
make their choices, we can see whether they agree on any of them and
discuss what that might mean.
Text Hierarchists Individualist Egalitarian Fatalist
Songs “God Save the “I did it my way” “We are the “Anarchy in
Queen” World” the UK”
Films Top Gun Color of Money Woodstock Rambo
Magazines Architectural Money Mother Jones Soldier of
Digest Fortune
Books The Prince Looking out for I’m Okay, 1984
Number One You’re Okay
Games Chess Monopoly New Games Russian
Roulette
Cruises Luxury cruise Rent a Yacht Eco-Cruises Ferry
Automobiles
Drinks
Beers
Liquors
Meals
Mobiles
Heroes
Heroines
What the chart shows is preferences for each lifestyle and, equally impor-
tant, differences with, or even hostility toward, other lifestyles. From a
discourse analysis perspective, we can also suggest that the language
typically used by members of each lifestyle differs as well. The language
used in Architectural Digest is quite different from the language used in
Soldier of Fortune. The language of English Lords and Ladies and upper-
class people inhabiting the upstairs of the great English mansions differs
from the language of the servants living downstairs. This chart was created
by my students twenty years ago and now is dated, but you can see from a
number of the texts listed how the different lifestyles consume media and
popular culture.
CHAPTER 16
Sacred and the Profane: Department Stores

and Cathedrals
Abstract The writings of Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade on religion,

and the difference between the sacred and the profane are explored.
Durkheim argues that the difference between the sacred and profane is
the most important differentiation in human thought and Eliade has a
book titled The Sacred and the Profane that explores topics such as sacred
time, sacred space, and related concerns. A discussion of the similarity
between department stores and cathedrals, as exemplars of the profane and
the sacred, is offered and a chart showing how department stores offer
versions of the sacred found in cathedrals but stripped of any religious
significance.
Application Two texts, one sacred, from the Bible, and one profane,
from the writings of Charles Darwin, are offered for discourse analysis,
with a focus on the language used in each kind of text.
Keywords Emile Durkheim Mircea Eliade Religion Sacred Profane

Department stores Cathedrals
All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one com-
mon characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real
and ideal, of which men think into two classes or opposed groups, gen-
erally delineated by two distinct forms which are translated well enough by
the words profane and sacred (profane, sacre) This division of the world

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_16
into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is
profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought: the beliefs, myths,
dogmas and legends are either representations or systems of representa-
tions which express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers
which are attributed to them, or their relations with each other and with
profane things. But by sacred things one must not understand simply those
personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a
pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred. A rite
can have this character; in fact, the rite does not exist which does not have
it to a certain degree. There are words, expressions and formulae which can
be pronounced only by the mouths of consecrated persons; there are
gestures and movements which everybody cannot perform. . . . In all the
history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories
of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one
another.
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965: 52, 53)
Emile Durkheim drawing
According to Durkheim, there is nothing in human thought as profound

or meaningful as the opposition between the sacred and the profane.
They are two worlds, each separate and each opposed to one another.
We can understand, then, why Mircea Eliade called his book The Sacred
and the Profane: The Nature of Religion: The significance of religious
myth, symbolism, and ritual within life and culture. He begins his book
16 SACRED AND THE PROFANE: DEPARTMENT STORES AND CATHEDRALS 147
with a discussion of the work of Rudolph Otto, who wrote a book titled
The Sacred, which focuses on the irrational aspect of religious experience.
Otto focused upon “numinous” (from the Latin numen or god), which
involved matters such as the feeling of terror in encountering the sacred
and a fascination with awe-inspiring religious mystery.
Eliade discusses how the sacred manifests itself and writes (1961:11):
Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as
something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of
manifestation of the sacred we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a
fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no
more than is implicit in its etymylogical content, i.e., that something sacred
shows itself to us.
In his book, Eliade has chapters on topics such as sacred space and sacred
time.
Religious thought makes a distinction between sacred space—think of
cathedrals, churches, synagogues, and mosques, places where miracles
have taken place, places where holy men have lived or visited—and profane
space, which doesn’t consider any space different from any other space.
Thus, Eliade quotes from the Old Testament where God says to Moses
(Exodus 3, 5) “Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet,
for the place where one thou stands is holy ground.” What distinguishes
sacred space from profane space is that in sacred spaces there has been a
hierophany which Eliade describes as (1961:26) “an irruption of the
sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic
milieu and making it qualitatively different.”
There is also a difference, Eliade explains, between profane time, which
is linear, and sacred time which is reversible. Eliade writes (1961:68):
By its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly
speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious
festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred
event that took place in a mythical, “in the beginning” . . . Hence sacred
time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable. From one point of
view it could be said that it does not “pass,” that it does not constitute
an irreversible duration.
It is in sacred time that explains, Eliade adds, our celebrations of the New
Year, in which (1961:78) “the sins and faults of the individual and of the
community as a whole are annulled, consumed as if by fire.” The celebra-
tion by Jews of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur,
when observant Jews fast and their sins are annulled and everyone is
cleansed, are good examples of what Eliade is talking about.
Earlier in the book I quoted Eliade about the camouflaged myths and
degenerated rituals that, he argues, play a major role in our everyday lives,
though we generally are not aware that this is the case or what the rituals
we practice mean. He explains that Marxism is based on myth. He writes
(1961:206):
Marx takes over and continues one of the great eschatological myths of the
Asiatico-Mediterranean world—the redeeming role of the Just (the “cho-
sen,” the “anointed,” the “innocent,” the “messenger;” in our day, the
proletariat), whose sufferings are destined to change the ontological status
of the world.
He relates Marxism to the myth of the Golden Age which religious

thought places at the beginning and end of history and the Jewish and
Christian eschatological belief in an end of history. History, for Marx, is
the story of class conflict until Communism is adopted everywhere and
classes disappear along with history. It hasn’t worked that way.
Let me now turn to an important all-consuming contemporary “degen-
erated ritual” in the applications section and discuss the resemblance
between cathedrals and department stores. They are, we will find, similar
in any number of ways. From a sociological perspective, I am arguing that
department stores can be seen as functional alternatives to cathedrals—
functional being defined as that which helps maintain an institution or
entity and a functional alternative being defined as that which functions as
an alternative to an institution or entity.
It occurred to me, a number of years ago, that there were remark-
able similarities between cathedrals and department stores. I developed
a learning game in which I asked my students (as usual in teams of
three, with one student functioning as a “scribe” and writing down
what the team came up with, and also participating in the discussion)
to see how many ways that they can see similarities between cathedrals
and department stores. Eliade would probably see department stores as
desacralized and degenerated versions of cathedrals, which means that

department stores have a sacred dimension to them, though this is
not obviously the case,
What follows is a chart that compares and contrasts the two institutions
and shows how department stores do have an element of the “sacred” in
them. A number of years ago I was on a radio talk show with Stanley
Marcus from Neiman Marcus. Before it started I told him about my
notion of comparing cathedrals and department stores and he said he
found the idea reasonable, because in ancient times cathedrals served as
centers for people to sell things of all kinds. So the idea isn’t as “far-
fetched” as we might imagine it to be—especially if we are not aware of the
two realms discussed by Durkheim and Eliade, the “sacred” and the
“profane.”
Cathedral in Barcelona
Department Stores Cathedrals
Profane Sacred
Modern Medieval
Paradisical: Heaven on Earth Now Paradisical: Heaven in the Future
Passion: Merchandising Passion: Salvation
Sales: Save Money Prayer: Save Souls
Sacred Texts: Catalogs Sacred Texts: Bible, Prayer Books
Clerks Clergy
Sell: Products Sell: God
Possessions as Signs of Spiritual Election Holiness as a Sign of Spiritual Election
Big Sales Religious Holidays
Sale of an Expensive Product Conversion of a Sinner
Buy Incredible Things Experience Miracles
Pay Taxes Pay Tithes
Muzak Religious Music
Lighting to Sell Lighting to Inspire Reverence
Bad Credit Penance
Advertising Proselytizing
Cash Register Offering Plate
Brand Loyalty Devotion
DEPARTMENT STORES AS FUNCTIONAL ALTERNATIVES

TO CATHEDRALS
Discourse analysts would be mostly interested in what we might describe
as sacred language, as found in the Bible, the Koran, and other similar
books. Some Jewish men, who are ultra-orthodox, spend their lives func-
tioning, in essence, as discourse analysts. They go over and speculate about
every word in the Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament.
Religious Jews have been doing this for thousands of years.
APPLICATION: SACRED AND PROFANE TEXTS

What follows are two texts—one sacred and one profane. Using the
resources of discourse analysis, with a focus on the language in these
texts—the nouns, the verbs, the adjective, the adverbs, and figurative
aspects such as metaphors and metonymies that we find in these pas-
sages. Analyze them and see if you can determine how they achieve their
aims and how they contrast with one another.
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

1. Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which
the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath
God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2. And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of
the trees of the garden:
3. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,
God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest
ye die.
4. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes
shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that
it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one
wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto
her husband with her; and he did eat.
7. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they
were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made them-
selves aprons.
8. And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the
garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid them-
selves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of
the garden.
9. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where
art thou?
10. And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
because I was naked; and I hid myself.
11. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou
eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest
not eat?
12. And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me,
she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
13. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou
hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and
I did eat.
14. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast
done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every
beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life.
15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between
thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise
his heel.
16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy
conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy
desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the
voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded
thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy
sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
CHARLES DARWIN, ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

As this whole volume is one long argument, it may be convenient to the
reader to have the leading facts and inferences briefly recapitulated.
That many and grave objections may be advanced against the theory of
descent with modification through natural selection, I do not deny. I have
endeavoured to give to them their full force. Nothing at first can appear
more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts
should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous
with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight varia-
tions, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty,
though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be consid-
ered real if we admit the following propositions, namely,—that gradations
in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do
now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind,—that all organs
and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable,—and, lastly, that there
is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable
deviation of structure or instinct. The truth of these propositions cannot,
I think, be disputed.
It is, no doubt, extremely difficult even to conjecture by what grada-
tions many structures have been perfected, more especially amongst
broken and failing groups of organic beings; but we see so many strange
gradations in nature, as is proclaimed by the canon, “Natura non facit
saltum,” that we ought to be extremely cautious in saying that any
organ or instinct, or any whole being, could not have arrived at its
present state by many graduated steps. There are, it must be admitted,

cases of special difficulty on the theory of natural selection; and one of
the most curious of these is the existence of two or three defined castes
of workers or sterile females in the same community of ants; but I have
attempted to show how this difficulty can be mastered.
These quotations are from two of the most important books ever
written and have played a major role in the development of human
civilization.
CHAPTER 17
Ideology: The Prisoner
Abstract Several different interpretations of the term “ideology” are

offered, and Marxist notions about the impact of ideology on various
aspects of contemporary culture and society are considered. Teun A. van
Dijk is quoted on the need for linguistic/discourse analyses of ideologies.
This leads to a discussion of the evolution of critical discourse analysis.
Application The cult television series, The Prisoner, is discussed and one
episode of the series “The General” is used to show how Marxist ideolo-
gical analysis can explain the significance of the events that take place in
the episode. The work of Raymond Williams is mentioned and his notion
of “hegemonial domination” is explored.
Keywords Ideology Critical discourse analysis (CDA) The Prisoner

Marxism
The concept “ideology” reflects the one discovery which has emerged from
political conflict, namely, that ruling groups can in their thinking become so
intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able
to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination. There
is implicit in the word “ideology” the insight that in certain situations the
collective unconscious of certain groups obscures the real condition of
society both to itself and to others and thereby stabilizes it. (p. 40)
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936:40)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_17
Applied to any aspect of culture, Marxist method seems to explicate the

manifest and latent or coded reflections of modes of material production,
ideological value, class relations and structures of social power racial or sexual
as well as politico economic or the state of consciousness of people in a precise
historical or socio-economic situation. . . . The Marxist method, recently in
varying degrees of combination with structuralism and semiology, has pro-
vided an incisive analytic tool for studying the political signification in every
facet of contemporary culture, including popular entertainment in TV and
films, music, mass circulation books, newspaper and magazine features,
comics, fashion, tourism, sports and games, as well as such acculturating
institutions as education, religion, the family and child rearing, social and
sexual relations between men and women all the patterns of work, play, and
other customs of everyday life . . . The most frequent theme in Marxist cultural
criticism is the way the prevalent mode of production and ideology of the
ruling class in any society dominate every phase of culture, and at present, the
way capitalist production and ideology dominate American culture, along
with that of the rest of the world that American business and culture have
colonized.
Donald Lazere (1977:755–756)
Karl Marx
There are many definitions of ideology and descriptions of its impact on

society. Generally speaking, they suggest that ideologies are logically
coherent belief systems that deal with politics and the goals of some
group or social class. Many people hold political beliefs but they don’t
always put them together in a logical way. Sometimes their beliefs are
17 IDEOLOGY: THE PRISONER 157
contradictory. The difference between these beliefs and ideologies is that

ideologies tend to by systematic and comprehensive. In the epigraph,
Mannheim divides the world into two groups: ideologists, who—to sim-
plify matters—see no good in political arrangements in their societies, and
utopians, who see no bad. The elites are so bound by their thinking that
they cannot recognize the degree to which they dominate the masses or
that there is anything wrong with this. And the masses also don’t recog-
nize the degree to which they are being dominated.
Lazere offers us the understanding of ideology that is found in the
writings of most Marxist critics who argue that the media and other forms
of communication are used in capitalist nations, dominated by a ruling
class, generates false consciousness in the masses (proletariat). What is
important to recognize is that while many people are not conscious of
their ideological beliefs that does not mean they don’t hold them. From a
Marxist perspective, everyone has ideological beliefs, which generally are
the beliefs that the ruling classes want them to have—beliefs which justify
the status quo and the unequal division of wealth found in modern
societies. The ruling classes do this since they control the mass media
and other institutions of society.
One of the most insightful explanations of the concept of ideology is
found in the Introduction to Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M.
Kellner’s Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. They write (2001:6):
The concept of ideology forces readers to perceive that all cultural texts
have the distinct biases, interests, and embedded values, reproducing the
point of view of their producers and often the values of the dominant social
groups. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the term “ideology” in the
1840s to describe the dominant ideas and representations in a given social
order . . . During the capitalist era, values of individualism, profit, competi-
tion, and the market became dominant, articulating the ideology of the
new bourgeois class which was consolidating its class power. Today, in our
high tech and global capitalism, ideas that promote globalization, new
technologies, and an unrestrained market economy are becoming the
prevailing ideas—conceptions that further the interests of the new govern-
ing elites in the global economy . . . Ideologies appear natural, they seem to
be common sense, and are thus often invisible and elude criticism. Marx
and Engels began a critique of ideology, attempting to show how ruling
ideas reproduce dominant social interests trying to naturalize, idealize, and
legitimate the existing society and its institutions and values.
Marxist thinkers argue that the media and other forms of communication
that are used in capitalist nations are dominated by a bourgeois ruling
class, who generate false consciousness in the masses. If people believe that
something like the class system is “natural,” they assume it can’t be
changed. If they believe that the class system is historical—made by
people—the implication is that what was made by people can be changed
by them. That is what Barthes meant, in a quote from his Mythologies
earlier in the book, when he talks the “mystification that transforms petit-
bourgeois culture into a universal nature.”
As we might imagine, ideology is of major importance to Critical
Discourse Analysis scholars who argue that language plays an important
role in generating ideological beliefs in people about social class, race
relations, the role of women and many other topics. As van Dijk writes
in Irina F. Oukhvanova-Shmygova’s edited volume, Perspectives and
Methods of Political Discourse and Text Research Volume 2 (2001:26):
Ideologies are usually studied in the social sciences, and not in linguistics.
And yet, in this contribution, I would briefly like to make the case for a
linguistic approach to ideology. The most obvious argument for such an
approach is the fact that ideologies often are expressed and reproduced by
language, that is, by language use or discourse. Communism, liberalism,
feminism, racism or anti-racism are unthinkable as powerful ideologies, and
would not be adhered to by so many people, without their being formulated
and reformulated in the daily utterances or their leaders and followers. . . . It
is this fundamental discursive nature of the reproduction of ideologies that
also makes a linguistic approach indisepensable in a broad, multidisciplinary
study of ideology.
What we learn from this passage is that ideology is expressed in language,

though these ideologies often hide from us in plain sight because we are
not alert to this function of language. Much of the material to which we
are exposed to the media has ideological content but people are generally
unaware of this. Thus, the task of the Critical Discourse Analyst is to
demonstrate the ideological nature of the language used in texts and
show its role in shaping relationships among people and the institutions
of society.
The multimodal critical discourse analysts deal with images as well as
texts and show how images can have ideological significance. We have
learned that the images we see in newspapers and magazines and on
television are not “reality” but someone’s interpretation of “reality.” It all

depends on what one includes and excludes in photographs, in the light-
ing and kind of camera shots used and so on. In the computer age, when
photos can be manipulated with ease, the photograph has lost its claim to
be a record of reality—not that it ever did anything except show the reality
the photographer wanted to show.
In Machin and Mayr’s How to do Critical Discourse Analysis they offer
an explanation of the beliefs that animate CDA research. They write
(2012:24):
The question of power has been at the core of the CDA project. Basically
power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education,
knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to
those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and
control subordinate groups. The aim in CDA has been to reveal what
kinds of social relations of power are present in texts both explicitly and
implicitly. . . . Since language can (re)produce social life, what kind of world
is being created by texts and what kinds of inequalities and interests might
this seek to perpetuate, generate or legitimate? Here language is not simply a
vehicle of communication, or persuasion, but a means of social control and
domination.
Language, then, is seen as a powerful tool that has ideological significance

in that it justifies the social order and the domination of the masses (or
proletariat for Marxists) by the elite classes. The term “critical” has a
similar meaning in mass communication research, where it is generally
associated with Marxist and ideological approaches, in contrast to “admin-
istrative” research, which tends to reflect the beliefs of the dominant
groups in society.
APPLICATION: THE PRISONER

The Prisoner was a seventeen-episode British television miniseries first
broadcast in the United Kingdom from September 29, 1967, to
February 1, 1968, which became a cult favorite in the United
States. The program is about a spy, played by Patrick McGoohan,
who resigns from what seems to be a spy agency and is abducted and
is being held against his will in a mysterious island, “The Village,”
Prisoner Bicycle
where everyone’s name is taken from them and everyone is identified

by their number.
McGoohan is given the number Six, and finds himself, in every episode
of the series (except the last one, which is a continuation of the one before),
locked into battles with various adversaries each of whom is a Number Two.
Number Six continually tries to escape and the people who run the island
continually try to find out why he resigned. In the final episode of the series,
Number Six escapes from the Village, which he destroys. He returns to his
apartment in London which is waiting for him. There are various websites
on Internet and there are a number of fan clubs for the series.
The first episode of The Prisoner, “Arrival,” opens with a scene in which
the hero, unnamed, drives to an office building and resigns. He is shown
in an office pounding on a desk and then leaving. We see his file being
dropped, by a mechanical device, into a filing cabinet titled “resigned.” He
returns to his apartment and begins to pack for a trip, but as he does, he is
gassed and passes out. He awakes in the Village, a totalitarian society run
by Number Two (there are different Number Twos in the series) who
often gets phone call from the leader, presumably Number One. The
Prisoner looks out the window of his apartment at the strange landscape
of the Village, finds his way to the administrative center of “The Village”
and confronts someone with a badge signifying he or she is Number Two.
We find this opening dialogue in fifteen of the seventeen episodes. We
can consider what is going on in this dialogue.
Prisoner: Where am I? (orientation question)

Number Two: In The Village. (answer)
Prisoner: What do you want? (request for information question)
Number Two: Information. (answer)
Prisoner: Which side are you on? (allegiance question)
Number Two: That would be telling. We want information, information,
information . . . (answer).
Prisoner: You won’t get it. (refusal to comply response)
Number Two: By hook or by crook we will. (answer showing
determination)
Prisoner: Who are you? (identity question)
Number Two: The new Number Two. (answer)
Prisoner: Who is Number One? (information question)
Number Two: You are . . . Number Six. (answer)
Prisoner: I am not a number! I am a free man. (identity affirmation
and resistance)
Number Two: (Laughing hysterically) Ha, ha, ha, ha. . . . (belittling
response)
The Prisoner, finding himself transported to a strange new place, confronts the
person in charge of the place and asks a number of questions seeking to find
out where he is and what is going on. Since there were many different Number
Two figures, each time an episode of the show began, we met a new Number
Two (except when the same actor played Number Two in several episodes).
Some fans of the show suggest that this opening dialogue reveals some-
thing significant. After the Prisoner asks “Who is Number One?” they
suggest there is a slight pause in the line when Number Two says to the
Prisoner, “You are . . . Number Six,” which would indicate that he is also
Number One—the person who controls the Village. This notion is very
controversial. The Prisoner was shot in the Welsh village of Portmeirion,
whose remarkable architecture contributes to the mysterious atmosphere of
the show. The Prisoner can also be seen as an allegory about the human
condition and a commentary on British social and political institutions of
the time. It is considered one of the television’s greatest triumphs.
One episode of the show, The General, is particularly interesting.
A professor/scientist has developed a powerful computer that can transmit
information directly into the cerebral cortices of anyone watching a pre-
sentation on television. Everyone in the Village is required to watch the
television presentation, which is advertised as Speed Learn. Number Six is
having coffee at a café when he notices a poster:
Our aim,
One hundred percent entry
One hundred percent pass.
Speed learn, a three year course in three minutes
It can be done. Trust me.
The professor hates Speed Learn but does what the administration of the
island tells him to do because his wife in also on the island and he is
worried about what the people who run it may do to her. The contents of
the television transmissions are approved by a special education commit-
tee, composed of members with top hats and tails, generally associated in
the public mind with plutocrats. With the help of Number Twelve, who is
part of the administration but is a rebel, Number Six manages to destroy
the computer, by feeding it a question it cannot answer, and as it is being
destroyed, the Professor grasps part of it in an attempt to save it and is
electrocuted. Number Twelve tries to save the professor and is also
electrocuted.
The Village is pervaded by alienation, which manifests itself in the loss
of names of everyone in it. Everyone is known by a number. This tells us
that the Village, though it looks like a lovely resort, is really a prison. In
addition, there is a pervasive atmosphere of distrust and of terror in
people. They are afraid of a huge white balloon, Rover, which kills people
upon Number Two’s command. Whenever Rover is seen, there is a howl-
ing wind noise.
Not only are the villagers alienated from themselves and each other, but
Number Two and his minions who run the Village are also alienated, both
from the people of the Village and themselves, for they too only have
numbers. In short, everyone in The Village is alienated from everyone else.
Number Two and his assistants can spy on everyone and control every-
one’s behavior, using sci-fi gizmos in many of the adventures.
When Number Six confronts Number Two about the General, Number
Six says that the General is an attempt to turn people into a bunch of
cabbages. Number Two replies “knowledgeable cabbages,” and adds that
the villagers are studying history now, but in the future the General will be
used for other purposes, and we are to infer that the main purpose of the
experiment is to completely control the minds of the villagers.
We can say that the General represents an attempt to dominate the minds
of everyone who becomes involved with Speed Learn, which means, since
Number Two and his associated demand 100 percent participation, every-
one. Speed Learn evades rational thought by imprinting ideas directly on the
brains of those who watch the television program and are subject to brain-
washing by those who run The Village. In the show, Number Two admits to
Number Six that the experiment involves brainwashing and points out that
Speed Learn requires both a trusted professor and the General to work.
The result of Speed Learn, when the test with the subject of history is
concluded, will be mind control and the spreading of false consciousness
among the villagers. They are so docile that it would seem overkill
brainwashing them with the General, but the existence of people like
Number Twelve shows that there still are those who wish to lead a
revolution or do something to diminish the administration’s control of
the Village.
We can suggest that not only do the Villagers have false consciousness,
in that they are unaware of their alienation and have a spurious sense of
community through their common knowledge of history, they are also
victims of hegemonial domination. Raymond Williams explained this
concept in his book Marxism and Literature. He writes (1977:109–110):
It is distinct in its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal

system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as “ideology.” It of course
does not exclude the articulate and formal meanings, values and beliefs
which a dominant class develops and propagates. But it does not equate
these with consciousness to them. Instead it sees the relations of dom-
inance and insubordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in
Raymond Williams
effect a saturation of the whole process of living—not only of political and

economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole
substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the
pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic,
political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of
simple experience and common sense . . . It thus constitutes a sense of
reality for most people in society, a sense of the absolute because experi-
enced reality beyond which it is difficult for most members of society to
move, in most areas of their lives.
Hegemonial domination involves subtly controlling people’s common-

sense notions of reality, of “that which goes without saying,” and because
it is all-inclusive, people do not recognize the degree to which they are
subject to hegemonial domination.
The media, we can say, play a major role not only in spreading ideology to
the masses but also hegemonial domination by giving people a world-view
that the ruling classes want them to have. In the Village, this ideological and
hegemonial domination is spread by the media, which the ruling classes
control, and will achieve its highest penetration by Speed Learn.
Marx argued that the ruling class survives by giving the masses false
ideas about their possibilities and status that prevent them from revolting
and seizing power. As Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The German
Ideology, in T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel. (Eds.) Selected Writings in
Sociology and Social Philosophy 1963:78):
The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e. the class
which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time the
dominant intellectual force. The class which as the means of material pro-
duction at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental
production, so that in consequence the ideas of who lack the means of
mental production are, in general, subject to it. The dominant ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relation-
ships grasped as ideas.
We are reminded of the class-based structure of the Village when we see the
members of the Education Committee dressed in top hats and tails—symbols
of upper classes. The members of the committee also need a coin to get in to
the building—the coin symbolizing their elite status. In the Village, there is
no money; everyone has a card from which expenses are subtracted.
In the Village, the lower one’s number, the higher one’s rank. Thus, Number
Two is second in command and Number Six is obviously high ranking. There
is, within the totalitarian society that is the Village, a member of the ruling
class who wants to fight against its domination of the proletariat of the village,
namely Number Twelve, who describes himself as “a cog in the machine.” In
several episodes of the show we find dissidents and revolutionary activity. In
this episode, it is Number Twelve who can be described as revolutionary, in
addition, of course, to Number Two. In Marxist thought, revolutionary
heroes fight for a new social order in which class domination and everything
related to this phenomenon are smashed.
Thus, Number Twelve offers to help Number Two destroy the General
and, we are led to assume, provides him with the coin and the clothes
needed—a top hat and tuxedo—to get into the town hall where the
meeting of the education committee is being held and the next history
lesson from the Professor will be broadcast. Number Twelve provides
Number Six with the message from the Professor about how terrible
The General is and Number Six is about to broadcast it when he is seen
at the station where the message is put into a device that is used to
broadcast the Professor’s lecture and subdued.
Number Twelve and Number Six can be described as Marxist heroes,

who attempt to counteract the propaganda and brain washing by the
Professor, an unwilling captive, and his monstrous creation, the General.
Number Twelve dies in the attempt to destroy the General, but Number
Six succeeds, so even though the two heroes were unable to defeat the
ruling class in the Village, they were able to destroy the General and end
the experiment with Speed Learn.
Although we don’t have Speed Learn in contemporary capitalist con-
sumer societies, we do have something like it, namely television commer-
cials. We can contrast television commercials, and advertising in general,
with its opposite—what I call Slow Learn. Slow Learn is what we find in
our educational institutions, such as universities, where it takes many years
of education to get a degree and where reasoning and study are the
dominant methodologies employed. However, as experimentation pro-
gresses with various electronic scanning devices, it may be that something
like Speed Learn will be created and advertisers will be able to imprint their
messages directly on our brains.
Advertisers have an effect on us, and their messages become lodged in
the unconscious elements in our brains, but that situation still leaves a
good deal to chance, which companies that manufacture products and
sell services to us would like to minimize. We can see that the Prisoner
and the episode called “The General” are both metaphors for contem-
porary society and its problems. Many people feel like they are prisoners,
though they are, in theory, free to achieve their highest potentials. And
one of the instruments of their imprisonment is the advertising world
that temps them with trinkets and consumer goods and diverts their
attention from their social status and situation.
CHAPTER 18
Culture: Identity
Abstract Some definitions of the term “culture” are offered, and the ideas
of cultural theorist Stuart Hall are quoted on the importance of the
production and exchange of meanings in the study of media and popular
culture. The ideas of the French psychoanalyst and marketing expert
Clotaire Rapaille are explored, and his notion that children are imprinted
during the first seven years of their lives is considered.
Application Theories about culture and language are used to explore the
notion of personal identity. It is suggested that there are two different
kinds of identity available to people now: an anonymous identity and an
authentic identity. The impact of postmodernism on our ideas about
identity is dealt with. A survey about the brands of products the reader
owns is offered as a means of suggesting the way readers use brands to
define themselves.
Keywords Culture Imprinting Anonymous identity Authentic identity

Brands
In different societies people not only speak different languages and dialects,
they use them in radically different ways. In some societies, normal conversa-
tion bristle with disagreements, voices are raised, emotions are conspicuously
vented. In others, people studiously avoid contention, speak in mild and even
tones, and guard against any exposure of their inner selves. In some parts of

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_18
the world it is considered very bad to speak when another person is talking,
while in others, this is an expected part of a conversationalist’s work. In some
cultures, it is de rigeur to joke and banter obscenely with some people but to
go through life not saying a word to others. Describing and explaining such
culture-specific ways of speaking is the task of “discourse and culture”
studies. . . . The greater challenge is to show the links between particular
ways of speaking and the culture of the people involved.
Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, “Discourse and Culture”
in Teun A. van Dijk, Discourse as Social Interaction
Language is a social practice—and many would want to say that it is the

defining social practice. Our social relationships are almost wholly realized in
language; language leads us to act and behave in certain ways, and it is a
powerful shaping force in how we think and construct the world we live in. It
would certainly be a mistake to believe that our social practices consist of
nothing but language but it is equally certain that the way we use language is
an essential part of our human experience. It may even be largely through the
social practice of language that we actually “construct” ourselves as we negoti-
ate through life. . . . Without necessarily realizing it at a conscious level, we
follow socially and culturally constructed communicative conventions.
Nicola Woods, Describing Discourse: A Practical Guide
to Discourse Analysis
Claude Levi-Strauss
18 CULTURE: IDENTITY 169
There are hundreds of definitions of the term “culture.” Let me begin

with the influential French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straus’ description
of culture and its relation to the unconscious from his book, Structural
Anthropology (1967:19–20):
The principle that anthropology draws its originality from the unconscious
nature of collective phenomena stems (though in a still obscure and ambig-
uous manner) from a statement made by Tylor. Having defined anthropol-
ogy as the study of “Culture or Civilization,” he described culture as “that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society.” . . . There is rarely any doubt that the unconscious reasons for
practicing a custom or sharing a belief are remote from the reasons given
to justify them. Even in our own society, table manners, social etiquette,
fashions of dress, and many of our moral, political, and religious attitudes are
scrupulously observed by everyone, although their real origin and function
are not often critically examined.
Boas must be given credit for defining the unconscious nature of cultural
phenomena with admirable lucidity. By comparing cultural phenomena to
language from this point of view, he anticipated both the subsequent
development of linguistic theory and a future for anthropology whose rich
promise we are just beginning to perceive. He showed that the structure of
language remains unknown to the speaker until the introduction of a
scientific grammar. Even then the language continues to mold discourse
beyond the consciousness of the individual, imposing on his thought con-
ceptual schemes which are taken as objective categories.
We see, from this passage, that culture is reflected in our use of

language; and like language, ordinary people are unaware of the struc-
ture of language just as they do not recognize the various codes that
shape much of their behavior and the ideologies that are found in
much of their popular entertainment and aspects of their everyday
lives.
Our interest in culture is influenced by the kind of work done by
anthropologists in pre-literate and far away societies as well as contempor-
ary literate Western (and other) societies. The focus is on the ways people
find meaning in things and events—which suggests a use of discourse
analysis to analyze cultural texts and the use of other related disciplines,
such as semiotics and psychoanalytic theory, as well. Stuart Hall suggests
in his book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying

Practices (1997:2) that culture is not essentially the things we have
(though material culture is an important element in culture) but “is
concerned with the production and exchange of meaning—the ‘giving
and taking of meaning’—between the members of a society or group. To
say that two people belong to the same culture means that they interpret
the world in roughly the same ways” and that they are able express
themselves in ways that other members of the culture will understand.
Hall calls this the “cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities.
As the authors of the passages in the epigraph make clear, language
plays an important role in the way we communicate with others and even
obtain our identities. And language is profoundly affected by cultural
conventions and codes—many of which operate below the level of our
awareness.
A French psychoanalyst and marketing expert, Clotaire Rapaille, wrote
a book, The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People
Around the World Live and Buy As They Do, which deals with the differ-
ences between different societies and how these differences are main-
tained. He argues that between the ages of one and seven, each national
culture “imprints” children with the codes of that culture (or subculture).
He writes (2006:21, 11):
Most of us imprint the meanings of the things most central to our lives by
the age of seven. This is because emotion is the central force for children
under the age of seven . . . An imprint and its Code are like a lock and its
combination. If you have all the right numbers in the right sequence, you
can open the lock. Doing so over a vast array of imprints has profound
implications. It brings to us the answer to one of our most fundamental
questions: why do we act the way we do? Understanding the Culture
Code provides us with a remarkable new tool—a new set of glasses, if you
will, with which to view ourselves and our behaviors. It changes the way
we see everything around us. What’s more, it confirms what we have
always suspected is true—that, despite our common humanity, people
around the world really are different. The Culture Code offers a way to
understand how.
So, children are imprinted with the codes in their national cultures (or
regional or local subculture variants) and these codes shape their behavior,
generally speaking, for the rest of their lives. These codes, as discourse
theorists explain, also affect the way children learn and use language and
the way their language use shapes their identities.
APPLICATIONS: IDENTITY
The terms are used in different ways by different people and loosely by
almost everyone. According to this schema, character and personality are
aspects of something more fundamental—namely identity. Character and
personality must also have continuity to be meaningful. At least that’s
what modernists thought and the way people still think. The question
people ask themselves when they question their identities, “Who am I?”
can be restated in another, more meaningful way—“How am I different
from others?” For, if people are not distinctive and different from others,
in some ways, we can question whether they have a personal identity.
Discourse theorists would answer the question differently. They would ask
“How is the language I use different from the way others use language and
what does the way I use language reveal about me?”
It is useful if we think of another way of defining identity that may be helpful
here. Suppose we break up the word identity somewhat differently than is
traditionally done and obtain two segments: one comprising the term “id” and
the other the term “entity.” If we think of the “id” in terms of the Greek idios
rather than the Latin idens we get a slightly different notion of identity, since
idios means private, personal, separate, distinct, and own. (An idiot is a “com-
pletely private person,” and our understanding of the word identity is closer to
the word idiosyncratic, though without the negative associations.)
This leads us to redefine identity in terms of a private thing, a personal
or distinctive thing, our own thing. People who use the phrase, “do my
own thing,” are really, without knowing it, asserting their right to act in
congruence with their perceived identities. This leads to an ethical pro-
blem: What happens when doing one’s “own thing” interferes with some-
one else’s “thing” or rights? The right of a person to do his “own thing”
implies the right of everyone to do their “own thing,” and when there is a
collision of “rights” it is very difficult to resolve, if doing one’s “own
thing” is the only criterion.
With our new definitions or understandings of identity in mind, we can
look at the problem posed above: In what ways is anyone distinctive, does
anyone have a personal, unique identity? I would make a distinction between
two radically opposed kinds of identities—what I call the anonymous identity
and what I call the authentic identity. To see the differences between these
orientations examine the chart which follows:
Anonymous identity Authentic identity
Extrinsically shaped Intrinsically shaped

Externally manipulated Internally or inner-directed
Mediated (shaped by media) Self-organized
Transparent Substantive
Chaotic Integrated
Anonymous self Authentic self
Impostor Real identity
Common Personal
Anonymous and Authentic Identities

The items on the left, under the Anonymous identity, all suggest random-
ness, haphazardness, falseness, and lack of coherence. A person who is
anonymous—that is without a name or without individuality—feels himself
to be a creation of external forces, a kind of fictitious entity, who has been
overwhelmed by mass society and the mass media. (This may help explain
the appeal of the sixties cult television program, The Prisoner, whose name
was taken away from him and replaced by a number assigned to him—six.)
He creates himself in different images, but there is no relation between his
image and his self, for he does not know his self. The images could have
been quite different, for there is no necessity behind one or another. In my
mystery novel, Mistake in Identity, I call these people “impostors.” An
impostor, from a discourse analysis perspective, can be seen as a person
who has, among other things, learned to use or has appropriated someone
else’s language. It could be a particular person’s language or the language of
a profession like medicine. Here is a passage from the novel:
“And someone, I can’t recall who, mentioned that you have a fascinating theory
about identity—namely that we’re all impostors, or something like that.”
Duerfklein laughed.
“Yes, impostors! That’s the word. My theories really bother my col-
leagues because they tend to look at human beings in aggregates, as
members of society or some class or culture or sub-culture. So they can

talk about things like behavior in crowds or American identity—whatever
that might be—or various ideological positions, that still deal with large
groups of people—women, gays, people of color, the proletariat. You
name it. My focus, since I have a psychoanalytic approach to things, deals
with individuals and how they achieve their identities. Or don’t achieve
them, since many people, as my theory suggests, are pretenders to an
identity.”
“I don’t understand how that can happen?” said Hunter. “Jean-Marie [a
philosopher in the book] said that in postmodern societies people often
change their identities to suit their whims, but that doesn’t seem to me to be
the same thing as pretending to have an identity or being an impostor.”
Duerfklein smiled, knowingly.

“You must remember that the term ‘personality’ is based on the Latin
root ‘persona’ which means mask. So our personalities are, it can be said,
masks that we create to deal with others in social situations. You might
contrast one’s personality with what might be called one’s character or
‘self,’ one’s true being. What I argue, based on my work with numerous
patients, is that many people never grow up, never cast off immature
notions and fantasies of what it means to be an adult, never achieve
coherence and continuity in their sense of themselves, so what you get,
ultimately, is a fake person, a simulation, a fraud. And these people can’t
help themselves because they don’t even recognize that they are impos-
tors. They’ve devoted all their energy to fooling others and they end up
also fooling themselves.”
“What did Socrates tell people to do? ‘Know thyself,’ he said. It isn’t
easy to do. Also, these impostors suffer from a kind of amnesia, especially
about their childhoods when many of the foundations for their identities
were established and their adolescent periods, when they were searching
desperately for acceptable identities. They forget who they were, so they
are condemned to continually creating new characters for themselves. It’s
rather sad.
What my psychoanalyst character is arguing is that many of us present to the

world a collection of pseudo-selves or impostor selves which change with
the dictates of the fashion world and media. This may be because we cannot
get in touch with our true selves, or will not, preferring to keep it sub-
merged as a way of avoiding pain. The price is a loss of strong feelings and of
a sense of self; in short, alienated anonymity.
Jean Francois Lyotard
A French scholar who has written extensively about postmodernism,

Jean François Lyotard, offers an example of this kind of person in his
book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He writes
(1984:76):
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one

listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch
and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro”
clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to
find a public for eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the
confusions which reigns in the “taste” of patrons. Artists, gallery owners,
critics and the public wallow together in the “anything goes,” and the
epoch is one of slackening.
In postmodern societies, like the United States and many other advanced
societies, one plays around with one’s identity at will. The financial cost is
the money needed to purchase the right clothes and accessories or take
trips to the right places. The psychic cost is the loss of self.
Although we have made some progress in understanding identity, I

feel there are further clarifications to be made, which will, in fact, lead up
to modify our notion of what identity is. There are several reasons for my
feeling this way. First, we have not said anything about personal history or
biography. It seems to me that a person’s unique history, and we all have
unique histories, has a great deal of influence upon a person’s identity. It
may be, of course, that our personalities shape our histories and experi-
ences in great measure, though that raises the question of how we arrived
at our personalities. In any case, along with character and personality, I
think we must consider biography as a fundamental constituent of
identity.
There is also the problem of whether identity is personal and private,
public, or both. For example, in David Karp’s nightmarish dystopia, One,
the hero is completely re-identified, via drug treatment, etc. He is given a
new name, a new (and fabricated) biography, a new job, new friends—
every social aspect of his identity is changed, and yet he himself is not
changed, and ultimately must be destroyed. His destruction is, it turns
out, his triumph, for the fact that he must be destroyed means that the
dystopia in which he lived cannot survive because it cannot completely
change people; there is something within them that resists all the tech-
niques of persuasion, manipulation, and re-identification that the state
can utilize.
This particular example raises an important question. Is identity
merely a collection of demographic and psychographic categories applied
to people: race, religion, education, sex, age, occupation, ethnic back-
ground, nationality, social class—and for discourse theorists, language
use—or is it that, as well as character, personality, and biography? The
solution to this problem may be in dividing identity up into two spheres:
the public or social, in which a person is “defined” as a collection of
psychographic and demographic categories; and private identity, in
which a person’s character, personality, and language use are the domi-
nant factors. We can split identity up into two parts: social identity and
ego or personal identity.
If Americans define themselves as seeing themselves as having escaped
from history and as Adamic innocents with no past, it means that the vital
historic dimension is lacking, so that identity is a problem for all
Americans, since they cannot rely upon a tangible, solid, historical back-
ground to tell them who they are. Escaping from history also means
escaping from a secure identity; this escapism leads to anxiety, conspic-

uous consumption, compulsive other-directedness and a host of other
plagues. Nobody knows who they are, so everyone imitates everyone
else. Thus, ironically, the lack of a historic identity, the lack of tradition,
means that people conform more readily to norms picked up from popular
culture and other institutions in our mass society. It is useful, here, to
recall Bakhtin’s notion of intertextuality and, when it comes to conversa-
tions, his emphasis on our remembering past conversations if we are to be
able to converse with others.
We escaped from history to become prisoners of the latest fad, prisoners
of the moment, of the media, of the present. Americans have not realized
that another word for rejection of the past, history and tradition is amne-
sia; and we tend to suffer from a cultural amnesia that troubles us sorely.
The problem of the amnesiac is, after all, that of identity. “Who am I?” the
amnesiacs ask, since they cannot remember their past; and we, as a nation,
have, in essence, the same problem. This matter is important to people
because national identity—being an American or a Frenchman, for
instance—plays a significant role in their individual identities. We are social
animals, and the social ambiance in which we grow up plays a major role in
our identity-formation. That is, our culture shapes us to a greater extent
than we generally recognize—viz. the matter of invisible walls and atti-
tudes toward space and many other attitudes and tastes we have. In the
case of Americans, the fact that we have (as a society) defined ourselves as
having escaped from the past, from history, means that each individual in
America has the task of creating anew his own identity—within the para-
meters, that is, allowed by his culture.
The Branded Self-Survey

It is a simplification but to a considerable degree, we define ourselves—in
our own minds and also to others—in terms of the brands of clothes we
wear and the brands of things we have. What follows is a survey of your
favorite brands for various items and details about them. Thus, for your car
you should indicate the model and the year it was built and for your
smartphone, you should indicate the brand and model. You may not
have some of the items listed or may have non-branded versions of
them. If so, please indicate that this is the case.
Item (Clothes, Cars, Etc.) Brand and Details
Automobile
Computer
Smartphone
Laptop
Tablet
Running Shoes
Blue Jeans
Hoodie
Dress Shoes
Watch
Sunglasses
Messenger Bag/Purse
Toothpaste
Deodorant
Pens
The question we must ask is—what do these brands of the objects listed
reveal about you? Do the brands you use in public differ from the ones you
use in private? Do you buy things based on their price or something else?
Are you ahead of the curve of fashions or do you follow the crowd. Is there
anything that catches your eye about the brands of the things you own,
about the brands of your stuff? If so, what is it? It would be an interesting
class project for everyone to post the survey without indicating their names
to see if there are any interesting commonalities or themes revealed.
CHAPTER 19
Nobrow Culture: The Maltese Falcon
Abstract Here we focus on negative and positive appraisals of popular

culture and mass media and their impact on culture and society that have
taken place in academic circles over the last sixty years. Some see the media
as dehumanizing and alienating while others argue that the media bring
culture to the masses. Virginia Woolf’s ideas on the relationship that exists
between lowbrows and highbrows is discussed. The typology of highbrow,
middlebrow, and lowbrow is explored. Finally, the impact of postmodern-
ism, which minimizes the differences between elite and popular culture is
considered.
Application An analysis of The Maltese Falcon is offered, which deals with

such matters as the Oedipal relationship between certain characters, the
relations between the hero, Sam Spade, and the police, and Spade’s sense
of ethics and social responsibility.
Keywords Mass media Popular culture Alienation Highbrows

Lowbrows Postmodernism
In SoHo, one walks in and out of shoe shops, jewelry stores, and art
galleries, and the shoes, the jewelry, and the art don’t seem any different
from one another as objects. This is Nobrow—the space between the
familiar categories of high and low culture. In Nobrow, paintings by van
Gogh and Monet are the headliners at the Bellagio Hotel while the Cirque

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5_19
du Soleil borrows freely from performance art in creating the Las Vegas
spectacle inside. In Nobrow, artists show at K mart, museums are filled with
TV screens, and the soundtrack of “Titanic” is not only a best-selling
classical album but one that supports the dying classical enterprises of old-
style highbrow musicians.
John Seabrook, “Nobrow Culture,” The New Yorker,
September 20, 1999
My working assumption is that popular literature expresses and reflects the

aesthetic and social values of its readers. As such the decision to participate
in genre literature is a matter of choice and not necessarily of ideological
brainwashing, cultural brow-beating, or declining literary standards. Debating
the aesthetics of genre literature demands, of course, attention both to its
literary and its socio-ideological traits, including the nature and range of its
subjects, the values it feeds back into public opinion, and the level of cultural
literacy it shapes.
Peter Swirski, From Lowbrow to Nobrow.
Since the publication of my Ph.D. dissertation on Li’l Abner in 1970, discussed

in the introduction of this book, I have been writing about popular culture. My
dissertation was accepted in 1965 so I’ve been interested in popular culture,
the mass media, what some call mass-mediated culture, and related considera-
tions, for more than fifty years. The debate about popular culture became full-
blown in 1957, with the publication of Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White. In this
book we find articles by scholars on both sides of the debate, from Ortega y
Gasset and Dwight McDonald to Melvin Tumin and Gilbert Seldes.
In the first section of the book, “The Issues Joined,” we find a chapter by
Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” which despises popular culture, and
one by White, “Mass Culture in America: A Different Point of View,” that
supports it. Some of Rosenberg’s indictments of popular culture suggest that
that we are being “dehumanized,” that our minds are being “deadened,”
and that we are the “objects of manipulation,” because of our exposure to
“sleazy fiction, trashy films, and bathetic soap operas.” Rosenberg adds that
for contemporary man, “life has been emptied of meaning, that it has been
trivialized. He is alienated from its past, from his work, from his community,
and possibly from himself.” “Mass culture,” he continues, “threatens not
merely to cretinize our taste but to brutalize our senses while paving the way
to totalitarianism.” He would probably see the rise of Donald Trump as
19 NOBROW CULTURE: THE MALTESE FALCON 181
connected to his mastery of the mass media (he received an estimated two
billion dollars’ worth of free publicity) and the cretinized cultural tastes of
the American public.
White, on the other hand, defends popular culture. He points out that
“Cassandras always catalogue the worst examples of mass media’s efforts
and consequently generalize that Doomsday is surely near.” That is, critics
often compare the worst examples of popular culture with the best exam-
ples of elite culture. Then he comes to the point:
In the minds of certain critics of mass culture the people will invariably
choose the mediocre and the meretricious. This mixture of noblesse oblige
and polite contempt for anyone outside of university circles, or avant-garde
literary groups, seems to me just as authoritarian as the anti-intellectualism
that the “masses” direct against scholastics.
In 1961, Norman Jacobs edited a book with a different perspective on

popular culture, Culture for the Masses. It was based on discussions and
essays that were first presented in a symposium held in June 1959 by the
Tamiment Institute and then in the journal Daedalus, which is where most
of the articles in the book first appeared. The book was reprinted in 1992
as Mass Media in Modern Society, with an introduction by Garth Jowett. In
this modern introduction, he writes:
Mass Media in Modern Society was one of a series of important books that
appeared in the short period between 1956 and 1962 that gave shape to the
intellectual arguments surrounding the issue of “mass culture” as well as
laying the groundwork for the emergence of popular culture studies in the
university. The first was the anthology Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America (1957) . . . followed by Reuel Denney’s wonderful collection of
analyses of various forms of popular culture, The Astonished Muse (1957),
William Kornhauser’s The Politics of Mass Society (1959), Leon Bramson’s
The Political Context of Sociology (1961) which dealt with the history of mass
society theories, and Dwight Macdonald’s acerbic but stimulating diatribe
Against the American Grain (1962).
Daniel Bell suggested that theories of mass society were extremely influ-
ential, second only to Marxism in their importance. I believe the term
“mass” culture is loaded, and that the terms “popular culture,” “mass-
mediated culture,” or to some extent “nobrow culture” are more accurate.
The term “mass” has negative connotations, especially in a country like the
United States that prides itself on its individualism and its exceptionalism.
If we are, as some culture theorists have suggested, “a nation of sheep”
(that is, conformist and other directed) we are, at least, our own kind or
breed of truly “exceptional” sheep.
I conclude this discussion with a wonderful quote from Virginia Woolf,
a highbrow’s highbrow, whose letter on the subject of the relation
between lowbrows and highbrows sums things up beautifully. She writes,
in a 1932 letter written but not sent to the New Statesman in England:
Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need
lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much
demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s
night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows
are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into
the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like.
Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding
full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see
themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to
them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them—to be shown what
life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show
them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only
people who can see things being done. This is so—and so it is I am certain;
nevertheless we are told—the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with
it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in
the streets do nothing but bark it—“Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows
hate highbrows!”—when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need
highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and
other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set
this malicious gossip afloat?
From a semiotic perspective, the term “highbrow” would be meaningless

if there were not “lowbrows,” since as Saussure reminded us, “in lan-
guages there are only differences,” and the most important difference is
the polar opposition.
In between the Lowbrow and the Highbrow is the Middle brow, whose
cultural life is torn between a desire or need to like Highbrow culture and a
love of some Lowbrow culture. There is a great deal of cultural material for
the Middlebrow, but Middlebrows also have the ability to partake of both
Lowbrow culture (watch wrestling matches on television) and Highbrow
culture (listen to the Opera on radio). A donkey, caught equidistant between
two bales of hay, supposedly will starve to death. We know, however, that
the donkey will walk to one bale of hay and eat it and then to the other. The
same applies to Middlebrows, but maybe also to Lowbrows, who may like
certain kinds of Highbrow culture, and Highbrows, who may like certain
kinds of Lowbrow culture. Nowadays, thanks to radio, television, and video
(think YouTube here), all kinds of culture is available to just about everyone.
There are some texts that are upper Lowbrow and lower Highbrow,
upper Middlebrow and lower Middlebrow, ad infinitum. And some
texts have moved from being thought of as Lowbrow to Middlebrow
or even Highbrow, and vice versa. The best solution is to declare
everything nobrow and not worry about dilemmas of classification
and aesthetics.
We can make sense of all these brows by recognizing that the nobrow
stance is an example of postmodern de-differentiation. Postmodernism
blurs the difference between “high” and “low” or “elite” and popular
culture.” That is the foundation, I would suggest, for the Nobrow per-
spective on the arts and culture.
APPLICATIONS: THE MALTESE FALCON

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is generally considered to be a
classic example of a hard-boiled (tough guy) detective novel. But it is more
than just a murder mystery. It has a remarkable cast of characters, deals
with ethical issues of considerable importance, and focuses upon the
destructive nature of greed. The book was also made into a great movie,
starring Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. Its hero, Sam Spade,
“a blonde Satan,” is worldly, cynical, tough, and unsentimental. The story
takes place in San Francisco.
In an early scene, after his partner Miles Archer has been killed, Spade
is visited by a detective, Tom Polhaus and his boss Lieutenant Dundy.
They are trying to find out if Archer was on a case and if so, who the
client was. Spade refuses to tell them, saying he has to speak to his client
first.
“You’ll tell me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly. “This is murder
and don’t you forget it.”
“Maybe. And here’s something for you not to forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell
it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out crying because
policemen didn’t like me.” (1972:20).
This confrontation establishes, in the reader’s mind, that Sam is tough and
independent and also establishes one of the main elements of the plot—
the suspicion the police have that Spade killed Archer because Spade was
having an affair with Archer’s wife, Iva.
The book starts off with a visit to Spade’s office by a beautiful woman
who says her name is “Wonderly.” (We later learn her real name is Brigid
O’Shaugnessy.) She says her sister has been spirited away by someone
named Floyd Thursby and she wants someone to find her and bring her
back before her parents return from a trip to Europe.
Miles Archer volunteers to shadow her and Thursby that evening. He is
killed at short range in an alley near the Stockton street tunnel. Later
Spade is visited by a duplicitous Levantine names Joel Cairo who wants to
hire him to find a statuette of a black bird and offers to pay him $5000 if
he finds it. Later he comes in contact with Wilmer Cook, a crazed kid, who
is romantically involved with Cairo and through Cook, with Casper
Gutman, a fat man who has been pursuing the bird, the Maltese Falcon,
all over the world for seventeen years. He believes it is made of gold and
jewels and is worth a fortune.
Spade and Brigid have a romantic relationship and Spade thinks he may
be in love, even though he recognizes that Brigid is not an angel. We read
Brigid’s description of herself:
“I haven’t lived a good life,” she cried. “I’ve been bad—worse that you
could know—but I’m not all bad. Look at me, Mr. Spade. You know I’m
not all bad don’t you? You can see that, can’t you? The can’t you trust me a
little? Oh, I’m so alone and afraid, and I’ve got nobody to help me if you
won’t help me.” (1972: pp. 35, 36)
Spade answers:
You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good.
It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throw you get into your voice when
you say things like “Be generous. Mr. Spade.” (1972, p. 30)
Gutman sends Brigid to Constantinople, where she teams up with Cairo

and gets the bird. She decides to double-cross Gutman, arranges to have
Cairo put in jail for a while and goes to Hong Kong with Thursby. They
give the Maltese Falcon to a Captain Jacobi, the captain of a boat, La
Paloma. He brings it to San Francisco but is shot by Cook. Jacobi escapes,
and before he dies, brings the Maltese Falcon to Spade. Spade puts the bird
in a safe place. Eventually, Spade, Brigid, Gutman, Cook, and Cairo get
together. Spade convinces Gutman to turn Cook, who Gutman regards as a
son, over to the police, because they need a “fall guy.” Gutman agrees and
they tie Cook up. Spade gets the Falcon, gives it to Gutman, who discovers
it is not made of gold and jewels. Gutman concludes Brigid got the wrong
bird in Constantinople and decides to return there to look for it. When he
leaves, Spade calls the police and tells them about Gutman and that he has
the gun that killed Archer. Spade then confronts Brigid and tells her that he
knows that she killed Miles, “in cold blood, just like swatting a fly.”
At the denouement, Sam tells Brigid that he’s turning her in.
“But—but, Sam you can’t. Not after what we’ve been to each other.
You can’t—”
“Like hell I can’t.”
She took a long trembling breath. “You’ve been playing with me? Only
pretending you cared—to trap me. You didn’t care at all. You didn’t—don’t
love me?
“I think I do,” Spade said. “But what of it? (1972, pp. 223–224)
Later Spade explains that he operates on a code of ethics. He explains:
When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It

doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner
and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in
the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s
bad business to let the killer get away with it. (1972:226–227)
He then lists seven reasons why he is turning her in, one of which is that
since he has something on her, he can’t be sure she won’t put a bullet
through his head. He concludes saying “Now on the other side we’ve got
what? All we’ve got it the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love
you.” (1972:226,227).
The characters in the story are all distinctive, vivid, and quite remark-
able, which helps explain why it was such a great movie. We already know a
good deal about Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaugnessy, a double-dealing
and compulsive liar, who used her good looks to lure Miles to a place
where he could be easily killed. Casper Gutman is a grotesque fat man who
devotes seventeen years of his life in a futile search for the Maltese Falcon.
His greed and passion is so great he is willing to sacrifice Wilmer Cook as a

“fall guy” to the police, even though Gutman says “I feel towards Wilmer
just exactly as if he were my own son.” Wilmer escapes and kills Gutman,
suggesting there are Oedipal elements to the story. Cook is a psychotic
killer who has a relationship with Joel Cairo, an effeminate homosexual
who works for Gutman but whose loyalty is questionable. Everyone in the
story has duplicitous relationships with everyone else, except for Sam
Space, who finds himself in the middle of it all.
Although The Maltese Falcon is, on the face of it, a “tough guy” mystery
story, it is more than that. It is also a morality tale which reveals the
dangers society faces from people without principles or a sense of social
responsibility. Gutman (a wonderful name for a fat man) and Brigid
become carried away with their passions and ultimately destroy them-
selves. Sam Spade has what we might call a theory of obligation. He has
a sense of loyalty and duty. He may not be an angel but he is, it turns out, a
good citizen.
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INDEX
A
on plot, 67
Abel, Karl, 38, 39
structuring of literary works, 67
Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture 5th Art of Comedy Writing, 115
edition, 48 Astonished Muse, 181
Advertising, 41
analyzing advertisements, 48–50
influence on individuals and B
society, 48 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 63, 69, 95, 108,
role in American culture, 50 119–124
total media ad spending Bally, Charles, 22
worldwide, 47 Barbie Dolls
Against the American Grain, 181 connotation and, 54
Alienation, 179 denotation and, 53
Allen, Woody, 124 Barthes, Roland, 55, 92, 158
American Journal of Semiotics, 55 Bateman, John, 99
Anatomy of Humor, 109, 115 Bateson, Gregory, 113
“The Antithetical Sense of Primal Bell, Daniel, 181
Words”, 38 Berger, A. von, 89
Architectural Digest, 143 Berger, Arthur Asa, 139
Aristotle, 29, 63, 66, 67, 68, 109 Bergson, Henri, 109
comedy and tragedy, 67–68 Bernstein, Basil, 137
definition of tragedy, 68 Bettelheim, Bruno, 63, 70–71, 73
difference from discourse analysts, 68 Beyond Laughter, 85
mimetic theory of art, 66, 67 Bible, 150, 151–152
on narratives, 66–68 Blondie, 79

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47181-5
192 INDEX
Blumler, J.G., 103 “Conditions for a Pluralist Democracy or

Bottomore, T.B., 165 Cultural Pluralism Means More
Bramson, Leon, 181 Than One Political Culture in a
Branaugh, Kenneth, 8, 82 Country”, 138
Brands, 167 Connotation, 53
knock offs and, 59 cultural meanings of terms, 53
semiotics and, 59 difference from denotation, 53
as status symbols, 60 Consumption, 135
use of icons, 59 Conversation
use of language, 59 full of gaps we fill in, 26
in Speed Dating, 26
Course in General Linguistics, 22, 140
C Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 1,
Cameron, Deborah, 78, 80 155
Campbell, Colin, 139 defined, 158
Capp, Al, 8, 10 focus on power and ideology, 159
Cards of Identity, 136 “Cultural Codes and Sex-Role
Cathedrals Ideology: A Study of Shoes”, 55
similarity to department stores, 148 Culture, 167
Stanley Marcus on, 148 cultural studies, 9
Cawelti, John, 101 cultural turn in social sciences, 170
Certeau, Michel de, 63–65, 105 imprinting in children, 170
Cervantes, Miguel de, 109 reflected in language use, 169
Chandler, Joan L., 55 unconscious codes, 169
Character and Culture, 38 Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to
Chatman, Seymour, 5, 64, 65 Understand Why People Around
Cigarette smoking the World Live and Buy as They
as a ritual, 131–133 Do, 170
ritualemes in, 131–133 Culture for the Masses, 181
social codes and, 132 Cumberbach, Benedict, 82
unconscious power urges
and, 132
Coca-Cola, 59 D
Cohen, Jodi R., 14 Daedalus, 181
Collective Search for Identity, 58 Danesi, Marcel, 14, 30, 94
Communication Darwin, Charles, 152
defined, 14, 15 Delin, July, 99
Roman Jakobson model, 16 Denney, Reuel, 181
Communication Criticism: Developing Dennis, Nigel, 136
Your Critical Powers, 14 Denotation, 53
Communication Models for the Study of difference from connotation, 53
Mass Communication, 14 literal meanings, 53
INDEX 193
Department stores Dondis, Donis A., 43

desacralized versions of Douglas, Mary, 128, 135, 138, 139, 140
cathedrals, 149 dreams
functional alternatives to antithesis and contradiction in, 38
cathedrals, 148, 150 (chart) represent something by its
Describing Discourse: A Practical Guide opposite, 39
to Discourse Analysis, 137, 168 Dress Codes: Meaning and Messages in
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by American Culture, 57
M. M. Bakhtin, 69, 120, 121 Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, 157
Dichter, Ernest, 18 Durkheim, Emile, 22, 129,
Dick Tracy, 79, 80 145, 146
Dictionary of Sociology and Related
Sciences, 128
Dijk, Teun A. van, 4, 6, 7, 55, 76, 78, E
82, 168 Eco, Umberto, 13, 17, 51, 52
Discourse analysis Elementary Forms of the Religious
communication of beliefs, 6 Life, 129, 146
cultural studies and, 54 Eliade, Mircea, 91, 93–94, 145, 146,
discourse different from text, 78 148
gender socially constructed, 137 eMarketer
home of theories of money spent in USA on
communication, 78 Advertising, 46
how language shapes social Total Media Ad Spending
identities, 4 Worldwide (chart), 47
interaction in social situations, 6 Engels, Friedrich, 165
interest in narratives, 65 Ethnomethodology, 1
language use, 6 defined, 7
method of doing research, 78 differs from discourse analysis, 7
multimodal, 6 Eve, 151
situated meanings, 120
social relationships and, 4
started with speech, 6 F
talk and text in context, 78 Facebook, 6, 54
use of language and, 4 Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 128
Discourse Analysis: Investigating Fairclough, Norman, 121, 122
Processes of Social Construction, 3 Fairy tales, 63
Discourse Analysis: Theory and basic elements in, 70–71
Method, 120 and levels of the psyche, 71
Discourse and Social Change, 121, 122 psychological processes enhanced
Discourse as Social Interaction, 168 by, 70
Discourse as Structure and Process, 4, 6, as UR narratives, 71–72
78 Falk, Pasi, 139
194 INDEX
Farb, Peter, 21, 24–25 Gerbner, George, 14

Fashion, 51 German Ideology, 165
as signs, 57 Getting Even, 124
brands and, 59 Gibson, Mel, 82
brands and identity, 60 Goddard, Cliff, 168
defined, 55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, 82–83
Georg Simmel on, 56–57 Grid-group theory
identity and, 57 competitive individualists, 135
ideology and, 55–56 egalitarians, 138–139
language in fashion ads, 60 fatalists, 138–139
aspects of, 58–59 four lifestyles and, 138
and women’s weak social hierarchical elitists, 138–139
position, 58 lifestyles explained (chart), 138
Faulkner, William, 124
Featherstone, Mike, 56
Ferdinand de Saussure, 22
H
Fish, Stanley, 78
Hall, Edward, 42, 43
Fiske, John, 103
Hall, Stuart, 167, 169
Frame, Mark G., 16
Hamlet, 77, 77, 83, 83–89
Franklin, Benjamin, 118
doubling of mother, 87
Freud, Sigmund, 35, 38, 39, 85, 108,
an ego figure, 87
109, 111, 122, 129, 130
father a superego figure, 87
Freud: Character and Culture, 129
Freudian analysis of, 86
Frisby, David, 56
Goethe on, 83
From Lowbrow to Nobrow, 180
mother an id figure, 87
Fry, William, 113
mother’s sexuality a problem, 86
Oedipal aspects of, 84
Oedipus complex, 85
G Hamlet, 1, 77, 81–83, 86,
Game of Love (drawing), 32 88–89, 97
Garfinkel, Harold, 7 central problem of play, 88
Gee, James Paul, 35, 37, 120 double revenge story, 89
Genre, 99 meaning in play or mind of
definition of, 100 analyst?, 85
formulaic stories, 101 polar oppositions in (chart), 83
learning exercise, 105–106 Hamlet and Oedipus, 83
as linguistically distinctive staged Hammett, Dashiell, 183
activity, 99 Hansen, Jarice, 44
philosophical problem of, 101 Hardy, Cynthia, 3, 6
romantic genre defined, 100 Harvard University, 15
seen as low brow, 100 Hayakawa, S.I., 36
uses and gratifications and, 102 Hebdige, Dick, 56
INDEX 195
Hemingway, Ernest, 123, 124 relation to character and

Henry IV Part I, 36 personality, 171
Henschel, Renate, 99 what brands reveal, 177
Herriman, George, 45–46 Ideology, 51, 119, 155
Herzog, Herta, 103 coined by Marx and Engels, 157
Hidden Dimension, 42, 43 Critical Discourse Analysis and, 158
Hobbes, Thomas, 109 defined, 156–157
Holmes, Sherlock, 55 Ideology and Utopia, 155
How to Do Critical Discourse Image, 41
Analysis, 9, 45, 148 Incongruity, 107
Humor, 123 Intertextuality
Humor, 107 appropriation of works by
aggression and, 111 others, 121
Aristotle on comedy, 109 conversations and, 121
comic vs. tragic (chart), 114 defined, 120
enigmatic nature of, 109 dialogic nature of, 120
45 techniques of (chart), 115 literary quotation, 121
incongruity theory of, 110 main focus in discourse
Jewish humor and marginality, 112 analysis, 122
Jewish jokes not masochistic, 111 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis:
jokes to analyze, 117–118 Theory and Method, 37
paradox theory of, 113 Introduction to Film Criticism: Major
psychoanalytic theory of, 111–112 Critical Approaches to Narrative
resolution of logical problems Film, 102
and, 113 Introduction to Visual Culture,
superiority theory of, 109–110 42, 43
use of techniques in jokes, 116–117 “Is There a Text in This Class?”, 78
what makes us laugh vs. why we
laugh, 114
Humor and Society: Resistance and
J
Control, 109
Jacobs, Norman, 181
Hwang, Hi Sung, 16
Jacobson, Roman, 15, 16
Jakobson, Roman, 13, 15, 16
I Jakobson model, 16
Identity, 167 messages, 14
American, 175–176 Johnson, Mark, 29, 31
anonymous vs. authentic (chart), 172 Johnson, Wendell, 36
brands and, 176 Jokes, 107
defined, 171 Jokes and Their Relation to the
impostor, 172–173 Unconscious, 111
personal history and, 175 Jones, Ernest, 83, 86
questions about, 175 Journal of Communication, 95
196 INDEX
Journal of Contemporary Laughter

Ethnology, 65 Bakhtin on, 107–108
Jowett, Garth, 181 liberating aspects of, 107–108
Joyce, James, 101 Lazere, Donald, 156
Lehn, Dirk vom, 7
Leviathan, 109
K Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91, 168–169
Kaiser, Susan, 55 Lifestyles, 135
Kant, Immanuel, 109 antagonistic nature of, 140
Karp, David, 175 characteristics of each, 139
Kellner, Douglas M., 157 Douglas and consumption and, 140
King Kong, 97 popular culture and (chart), 142
Klapp, Orrin, 58 rejection of other lifestyles, 139–140
Koran, 150 Li’l Abner, 1, 9, 10, 180
Kornhauser, William, 181 example of critical multimodal
Krazy Kat, 45–46 discourse analysis (CMDA), 8
Labov, William, 69 my PhD dissertation, 8
Lakoff, George, 29, 31 Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, 9
Little Red Cap, 72–75
Lotman, Yuri, 77, 79, 81
L Lyotard, Jean-François, 174
Language, 91
basic to social relations, 137
conceptions arise through M
comparison, 39 Machin, David, 9, 43, 45, 159
elaborated codes, 137 Maltese Falcon, 80, 99, 101,
45 phonemes in, 25 179, 183
function words and content words, 26 code of ethics of hero, 85
how signs function in, 39 hardboiled detective novel, 183
and prediction of dating in speed Oedipal aspects, 186
dating, 26 Mannheim, Karl, 155, 157
reflects character and personality, 27 “Mapping the Multimodal Genres of
restricted codes, 137 Traditional and Electronic
Saussure on, 39 Newspapers”, 99
seeing things in terms of their Marcus, Stanley, 149
opposites, 40 Marlboro cigarettes, 132
a social practice, 137 Marx, Karl, 122, 148, 156, 165
structured by rules, 25 Marxism
a system of signs, 53 analysis of media, 157
two codes found in England analysis of “The General”, 165–166
(chart), 137 applied to culture, 156
Language in Thought and Action, 36 and Critical Discourse Analysis, 158
INDEX 197
critique of capitalism, 157 Moses, 147

hegemonial domination and, 164 Motivation research, 18
Marxism and Literature, 163 Multimodal critical discourse analysis
Marxist heroes, 166 (MCDA), 44–45
Massachusetts Institute of Multimodal discourse analysis, 1
Technology, 15 Myth and Modern Man, 93
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in Mythologies, 94
America, 180 Myths, 91
Material culture, 13 Barthes on myth, 92
Dichter on objects and identity, 18 camouflaged nature of, 94
as expression of personality and defined, 93
taste, 19 dictionary definition of, 93
Matsumoto, David, 16 Eliade definition of, 94
Mayr, Andrea, 9, 45, 159 meaning above language level, 91
McDonald, Dwight, 181 myth model, 95–97
McGoohan, Patrick, 159, 160 Oedipus, 97
McQuail, Denis, 14, 15 Oedipus and myth model, 97
Media and Culture: Key Works, 157 and our origins, 94
Media and Myth, 97 in popular culture, 95
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate relation to symbols, 94
Dictionary, 93 still affecting modern man, 93
Merton, Robert K., 127
Metaphor, 29
based on analogy, 30 N
conceptual system based on, 31 Narratives, 63
defined, 29–30 Aristotle on, 66–68
implications of “love is a as basic human cognition mode, 66
game”, 33–34 components of, 69
pervasive in everyday life, 31 de Certeau on, 64
simile defined, 30 defined, 64
use in conversations, 32 discourse analysis and, 65
Metaphors We Live By, 31 expression or ‘discourse’, 5
Metonymy, 29 kernels and satellites, 65
background knowledge important, 30 Labov on, 69
based on association, 30 pervade society, 65
defined, 30–31 pervasive nature of, 65
synecdoche, 31 role in our lives, 65
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 42–43 stories and expression, 64
Mistake in Identity, 172 story or “histoire”, 5
Moliere, 109 way we organize experience, 65
Monaco, James, 30 Natural Symbols, 128
Morgan, John, 43 Neiman Marcus, 149
198 INDEX
New Directions in the Analysis of three kinds of, 123

Multimodal Discourse, 99 use of 45 techniques of
New Statesman, 182 humor, 123
New Yorker, 180 Woody Allen on college
Nobrow culture, 179, 180 bulletins, 124
brow categories, 182–183 Passover Haggadah, 1
Virginia Woolf on brows, 82 Patai, Raphael, 93
Nonverbal communication, 13 Paton, George E., 109
defined, 16 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 23, 51,
importance of semiotic signs in, 17 52, 122
Nonverbal Communication: Science Pennebaker, James, 21, 26
and Applications, 16 Perfusion of Signs, 52
Norrick, Neil R., 123 Perspectives and Methods of
Political Discourse and Text
Research, 158
O Phillips, Nelson, 3, 6
“The Object of Linguistics”, 23 Pinterest, 6
“Obsessive Acts and Religious Poetics, 66, 69
Practices”, 129 Political Context of Sociology, 181
Obsessive-compulsive behavior, 127 Politics of Mass Society, 181
Oedipus, 91, 95, 97 Popular culture, 91, 135
Oedipus Complex, 98 alienation and, 180
Oedipus Rex, 85, 97 criticisms of, 180
Olivier, Lawrence, 82 defenses of, 181
One, 175 lifestyle preferences and, 143
Oppositions, 35 Postmodern Condition: A Report on
in dreams, 38 Knowledge, 174
in language, 39 Postmodernism, 179
Orenstein, Robert E., 41, 44 eclecticism and, 174
Origin of the Species, 152–153 identity and, 174
Orwell, George, 120 Powell, Chris, 109
Osgood, C.E., 14 Practice of Everyday Life, 105
Oswald, Laura, 59 Primer of Visual Literacy, 43
Otto, Rudolph, 147 Prisoner, 155, 172
Outkvanova-Shmygova, Irina F., 158 first episode of series, 161
“The General” episode, 162–163
Marxist analysis of “The
P General”, 162–163
Panovic, Ivan, 78, 80 Number Six as metaphor, 166
Parody, 119 opening dialogues in, 161
conscious intertextuality, 123 TV miniseries described, 159–160
definition of, 123 Psychology of Consciousness, 44
INDEX 199
R significance of religious myth,

Rabelais and His World, 108 symbolism, and
Radway, Janet, 100 San Francisco State University, 17
Radway, Janice, 104–105 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 21–24, 39,
Rapaille, Clotaire, 170 51, 52–53, 122, 140
Reading the Romance: Women, Scholes, Robert, 14
Patriarchy and Popular Schutz, Howard G., 55
Literature, 100, 104 Seabrook, John, 180
Representation: Cultural Sechehaye, Albert, 22
Representations and Signifying “The Secret Agent”, 95
Practices, 170 See What I Mean: An Introduction of
Richardson, Laurel, 65 Visual Communication, 43
Rieff, Philip, 38, 129 Seinfeld, 101
Ritual, 127 Selected Writings in Sociology and
cigarette smoking as, 131–133 Social Philosophy, 165
define, 127–128 Semiotics, 21, 51
importance to religion, 128 brand equity and, 59
neurotic ceremonials concepts defined differentially,
and, 130 23
obsessive compulsive disorder defined as science of signs, 22
(OCD), 130 everything that can be taken as a
psychoanalytic theory sign, 52
and, 129 language different from speech, 23
relation to myth, 128–129 “in language there are only
role of social, 129 differences”, 23
Rosenberg, Bernard, 180 language is a system of signs,
Ross, Ralph, 128, 129 22
Routledge publishers, 7 Peirce’s trichotomy, 52
Rubel, M., 165 use by Roland Barthes, 55
Rubinstein, Ruth P., 51, 57 use in multimodal discourse
analysis, 54
used to be called semiology, 22
S “Semiotics and Strategic Brand
Sacred, 147 Management”, 59
Sacred Shakespeare, William, 36, 81, 82–83,
hierophany as manifestation of the 109
sacred, 147 Shopping Experience, 139
space, 16 Sibley, Mulford Q., 8
time, 147 Sight, 41
Sacred and the Profane: The Nature Donis A. Dondis on, 43–44
of Religion: The ritual within macular vision, 42
life and culture, 93, 145, 146 retina, 42
200 INDEX
Sight (cont.) insertion into history, 122

role of eye in processing Lotman on, 79
information, 44 meaning in text or mind of reader?, 78
role of fovea in, 41 meaning tied to knowledge of
Signs, 13, 21, 51 reader, 81
can be used to lie, 53 the more you know, the more you
combination of signifier and see, 81
signified, 51 Selig Harris on, 80
iconic, 52 shaping of contemporary
indexical, 52 consciousness, 122
signified is concept, 51 Theodorson, A.G., 14
signifier is sound-image, 51 Theodorson, S.A., 14
symbolic, 52 Theory of Semiotics, 52
Simmel, Georg, 51, 56, 58 Trump, Donald, 180
Situated meanings, 35 Twain, Mark, 109
cultural models and, 37
and patterns we notice, 37
Six-Gun Mystique, 101 U
Soldier of Fortune, 143 Understanding Media Semiotics, 94
Speed dating, 21 Understanding Video, 44
Star Wars, 123 Uses and gratifications, 99
Story and Discourse, 5 best genres for (chart),
Strategy of Desire, 18 103, 104
Structural Anthropology, 169 early research on, 103
Structuralism: An Introduction, 14 romance novels and, 104–105
Structure of the Artistic Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning
Text, 79, 81 and Importance of Fairy
“The Study of Discourse”, 4, 6, 78 Tales, 70, 72
Superego, 130
Sweet Madness: A Study of
Humor, 113
V
Swift, Jonathan, 109
Virginia Slims cigarettes, 132
Swirski, Peter, 180
Symbols & Civilization, 128
W
T Welton, Peter, 43
Texts, 62, 77 Wesley, Oscar, 128
importance of contexts for White, David Manning, 180, 181
meaning, 80 Why It Sells, 30
INDEX 201
Wierzbicka, Anna, 168 Words, 35

Wildavsky, Aaron, 136, 138, Falstaff on, 36
139 situated meanings, 37
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 83 social groups and subcultures, 37
Williams, Raymond, 163 Working with Written Discourse, 78, 80
Windahl, Sven, 14, 15
Woods, Nicola, 137, 168
Woolf, Virginia, 182 Y
Word Play: What Happens When Yale university, 78
People Talk, 24 Yus, Francisco, 21, 26

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Applied Discourse Analysis

Arthur Asa Berger

ISBN 978-3-319-47180-8 ISBN 978-3-319-47181-5 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: © Bitboxx.com

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Li’l Abner and Critical Multimodal

2 Communication: What Objects Tell Us 13

3 Language: Speed Dating 21

4 Metaphor: Love Is a Game 29

5 Words: Freud on Dreams 35

8 Narratives: Fairy Tales 63

10 Myths: The Myth Model 91

11 Genres: Uses and Gratiﬁcations 99

12 Humor: Jokes 107

13 Intertextuality: Parody 119

Part III Concepts

14 Ritual: Smoking 127

15 Lifestyles: Grid-Group Theory 135

16 Sacred and the Profane: Department Stores

17 Ideology: The Prisoner 155

18 Culture: Identity 167

19 Nobrow Culture: The Maltese Falcon 179

Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic

on semiotics and media criticism as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. In 2014,

Introduction: Li’l Abner and Critical

Abstract Intertextual nature of texts and applied discourse analysis are

Application The author’s dissertation on the American comic strip

Keywords Intertextuality Ethnomethodology Critical discourse

© The Author(s) 2016 1

Traditional qualitative approaches often assume a social world and then

qualitative methodologies work to understand or interpret social reality

Teun A. van Dijk

What exactly is discourse, anyway?

So understanding what discourse analysis isn’t easy because it is a “fuzzy”

Chatman’s discussion helps us understand how discourse analysis differs

interaction? Moreover, besides giving systematic descriptions, we may

Ethnomethodologists are ethnomethodologists. Discourse Analysis in my

Van Dijk describes discourse analysis as a multi-disciplinary approach

My answer is that this book is different from other books on discourse

Shmoo drawing by AAB

LI’L ABNER AND CRITICAL MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

of interest to the newest development in discourse analysis, what is called

What this passage suggests to me is that in 1964, when I wrote my

My book has chapters on Li’l Abner’s place in American Satire, on

Communication: What Objects Tell Us

Abstract Different deﬁnitions of the term are offered from communication

Keywords Objects Material culture Nonverbal communication Signs

Though communication is certainly a tool for conducting the everyday business

© The Author(s) 2016 13

untouched by communication, is difﬁcult. . . . In short, communication plays a

Whether we are considering ordinary conversation, a public speech, a letter,

Communication, as linguists such as Roman Jakobson have suggested,

The transmission of information, ideas, attitudes, or emotion from one

Another deﬁnition of communication is offered by semiotician Marcel

Social interaction through messages; the production and exchange of mes-

McQuail and Windahl offer their own deﬁnition of communication (1993:5):

Thus, in the most general terms, communication involves a sender, a

There is a common theme to these deﬁnitions: central to the communica-

There are six elements in Jakobson’s model which is shown below

The message is affected by the context in which it is sent (we speak

Although “language” often comes to mind when considering communica-