Faculty Questions:

Q1 – Technology

The film Until the End of the World explores issues about various technologies and their effects. Analyze its presentation of technology and its attitudes toward its effects. Compare it with at least two of the following – (Postman – use it and one of the others if you were in the program Fall quarter), Kern’s Culture of Time and Space, the film The Image of the World and the Inscription of War, and Savedoff’s Transforming Images. We will show the film Until the End of the World, Tuesday, Feb 20, 5 pm in LH 1.

Q2 – Cognition

At the center of Hall's book is an argument about the cognitive status of representations. In particular, Hall sets his constructivist account of the meaning and truth of representations over against accounts that ground representation in mimesis or intentions. Write an essay about the way these ideas about the status of representation are worked out in the two of the following: Downey on mirrors in The Looking Glass, Savedoff on photography, Weschler on museums, Woolf on making art.

Q3 - Education

The Reading Images chapter "The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication" offers a defense of the educational importance of images. Compare or contrast its argument about the educational effects and value of this technology with at least two of the following: Flaubert on how reading newspapers and reading romance novels affects their audiences, the chapter on the effects of soap opera on its audiences in Hall, or Keaton on how the movies affect viewers.

Q4 -

The soap opera chapter in Hall discusses the controversy about the marginality of women's culture. Compare or contrast that chapter's view of women's culture with its representation in Madame Bovary and To the Lighthouse. In addition, you might optionally consider the issue in Keaton's Sherlock Jr, San Soleil (Sunless), or Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Q5 -

Discuss the ideas of Savedoff, Kress and Leeuwen's Reading Images selection, or Pound about how images signify meanings. Analyze examples from one or more of the montage films (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Ballet Mechanique, etc.) using these ideas.

Q6 -

How does the Museum of Jurassic Technology operate? Compare and contrast it with Piaget's ideas about the process of development and education, and with at least one of the following: Ballet Mechanique, various moments in To the Lighthouse, or Kern's account of what happened to form between 1880 and 1918.