#intertexuality

[letallthetrashraindown]

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

A History of My Brief Body, Billy Ray Belcourt / unknown / Alison Zai / For Your Own Good, Leah Horlick / Power Politics, Margaret Atwood

[llovelymoonn]

do you have or could you make a webweave about nostalgia? specifically of the yearning and grieving variety. it's killing me that all of it is gone forever, that all that remains is an echo, and that it will only keep fading. big yikes.

@robertszombie \\ jordanna kalman \\ jordanna kalman \\ @wearemadeofstardust0 \\ david foster wallace \\ jordanna kalman \\ okechukwu nzelu here again now \\ jordanna kalman \\ jordanna kalman \\ jordanna kalman

kofi

[everyforkedroad]

Intertexuality - Parallels between Shine and The Hunger Games

I know this might seem like a stretch, but bear with me on this one. I spent years studying dystopian fiction, and The Hunger Games specifically. Therefore, I can't help but see the parallels between Katniss/Prim and Trin/Victor.

Both Prim and Victor are targeted, not only for what they do, but for what they represent. Prim is a symbol of innocence, the untouched promise of a better tomorrow. Victor is the embodiment of youth itself, hope, vitality, the possibility of change. Their deaths are also co-opted by the regimes that cause them - Prim's is blamed on the Capitol, Victor's is blamed on the Communists.

Authoritarian systems recognize the symbols of youth and the threat they represent. They cannot allow innocence or hope to survive, because both ignite resistance, especially when they take their places within resistance movements. As President Snow chillingly reminds us: “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous.”

Katniss spends the series fighting to protect her sister. Trin spends the series fighting to shield Victor. And yet, in the logic of these narratives and of the oppressive regimes they portray, the young are always the first casualties. They are marked by death in the story, and nothing their protectors do changes that fact.

Their deaths are not random. They are deliberate acts of power, stripping away the illusion that anyone can be spared from the oppressor. And the devastation operates on multiple levels: they shatter Katniss and Trin personally, galvanize resistance, and remind the audience of what authoritarianism always consumes first, the future itself.

[ceemetery]

home is the first grave

@filmnoirsbian x (from @willemdafoegf 's post // catherine lacey // chen chen // silas denver melvin // aloha from hell, richard kadrey // courtney love prays to oregon // @heavensghost // st. lucy’s home for girl’s raised by wolves // x // taylor swift’s “my tears ricochet” // this post @ceemetery

buy me a coffee

[waluigi-haunts-me]

22:57

the    time          is            ticking                    away.

away, away, away. the aways are so busy in my head i can’t stop them coming. of course its not the aways that are flurrying like smoke, or sobriety. it’s time.

loud like that song i used to like, like na na na (na na na na na) (there were more nas though, buckets and buckets of ‘em) that was dystopian, and colorful, sandy

and light.

there’s new dystopia now. wait, no. no, its older, older than the song (but i found it later). women in red and blue and coloured lines. the econowives, they sound metallic, of coins scratching against walls, against bars. and that’s colourful too, but a different kind of colourful. the vibrancy doesn’t spill over the edges, doesn’t merge. the greyness spills over into life, though. that is assured. and it isn’t emo boys screaming into microphones any more.

its steady time dancing by candlelight, dancing its life away. its afro braids, and blonde highlights withering grey with silence together time is passing, waiting for tongues; teeth. instead eyes flicker betraying placid smiles, teetering on some knife’s edge, some cliff.

                          its                    23:16              now.      losing time. time to talk.

there’s only rabbit hole        after rabbit hole in talk. some dark massless place.        only futility.               futility? the silence is louder aboveground somehow.

and so i step up, into the darkness within;                                                            or else,

                                                                      the light.

[w-o-o-l-f]

There are no beginnings and no ends, no sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual 'levels' to tell you what is more or less significant. All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of 'influence' but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such thing as literary 'originality', no such thing as the 'first' literary work: all literature is 'intertextual.' A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point.

Terry Eagleton - Introduction to Literary Theory

[ifdragonscouldtalk]

I've never heard of No Exit. I feel like I'm missing something major in my life now.

Oh my goodness! 

No Exit is a play, I read it in highschool, by French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre that was later translated into English (and other languages). It’s the basis for the show The Good Place, although TGP takes a far different approach than Sartre did. As well as being a hugely popular existentialist piece (existentialism is a philosophical theory that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will; No Exit reverses this theory and The Good Place reestablishes it) it was a very socially advanced play! 

No Exit basically has three people locked in a room and told their in Hell. One, a man who’s a huge dick, one a lesbian who got her lover to leave her husband, and one a bisexual who’s stuck in between the two. It brings up the idea that a person’s worst hell is other people. In The Good Place, Michael has the same theory – only, unlike No Exit, his theory doesn’t work, and the inherent flaw is because everyone put in his “Good Place” develop even more after their deaths, whereas in No Exit the theory is sound and it drives the three insane. Examining the two, The Good Place is really a better existentialist piece than No Exit is but they both play off the same fundamental theory, and Michael Schur (writer of the Good Place) has admitted that his original idea was largely based off of No Exit. 

It’s a really short but wonderful play, hugely thought provoking and honestly funny – but it does examine a lot of the human psyche. It’s meant to make you think, just like The Good Place is, but it was written 70 years ago, so it’s a different sort of media simply because society changes (and also TGP is the US and No Exit was France). If you’d like to read it, it’s available in full online here! 

[ivanmtz360-blog]

Semiotics

[Image by Shane Bzdok, Titled: Semiotic,  Source: Flikr]

This weeks discussions and homework assignments revolved around Semiotics and their relevance to our culture and class. The reading were a general overview to Semiotics and the sub-topics that branch off of it such as encoding/decoding, coding, articulation, intertextuality, and D.I. Y. Semiotic Analysis. It was a very gray thing to study, since everything was rather abstract and complex in terms of how Semiotics works. Encoding and decoding in semiotics is the basic principle to what is being put and taken from signal or texts. Articulation how these intricacies or codes are placed in order to communicate a specific message connected the the exterior context it is placed in. Intertextuality is how a certain code or text is connected to other codes and texts, characterizing it as a separate entity from its source. D.I.Y. Semiotic Analysis is a process stated to be applicable to anything of significance within a culture, which is practically anything. In the class discussion, were asked to submit questions regarding the article we had to read, and most had to do with definitions of a term. That was again a very abstract thing to do, since the article did not give a clear definition for each term, but rather their applicability and their use. With that, we discussed their applicability to what we learned and how semiotics can be applied to the theoretical processes discussed throughout the semester such as Stuart Hall’s Theory and Stasis. For example, the way information is processed and how it is encoded can be applied to Semiotics quite easily. Since Semiotics applies to almost anything with textual context, coded, or meaning, Stuart Halls can be used to convey the process behind semiotic practice and how audiences decode it and so forth. In terms of everything we’ve covered, Semiotics seems to cover more ground than any other topic since it is a general term pertaining to almost everything, to even the way we perceive signal lights to road signs.