Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

M. Gallagher's picture

Week One

Well, since we went over the first image in a bit of detail in class, I'll just write my reactions to the second image (in a sort of telegraph/note structure).

Image two: surrreal. Rather stark Dali-esque figures. The hand is a hill flipping the pages of a book, which sprout the growth of colorful flowers and butterflies; it's somewhat trite to have books representing knowledge which represent growth. Ladder to hand impling that it's an aid to this gain of knowledge? Farmers/other (uneducated) figures toiling (the fields) with a barren tree as their sole companion.

 

Anne Freadman's metaphor/allegory/simile that genre is a game of tennis seemed a bit bulky to me. It ended up working alright, but it seems to have confused the matter by adding yet another layer of abstraction. The best part I noticed was when she talked about how genre should be defined by a system of contrasts rather than the inherent nature of the work. This tied into the idea of an "ideal form" for a genre. Thus, there could be an archetype (or, perhaps more accurately, a holotype) for a genre that would obey all of the contrast rules, while the rest of the texts might just obey the majority of them; the fewer contrast rules obeyed, the more divergent from the holotype (and thus genre) that specific text would be.

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
3 + 2 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.