Roland Leighton

Saussure Within The Great Gatsby Structuralism can be described as a critical movement of literature that studies how elements of a text can be understood more efficiently by examining its relationship to the overall composition of a text. Ferdinand de Saussure, the “father of modern linguistics” (845) is a prominent critic in the Structuralism movement. The understanding of Saussure’s theory in Structuralism will be examined using mathematical examples and applied to interpret The Great Gatsby…

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have been at the centre of Post Modernist and Post-Structuralist discourse since the 1980s. This paper will address the arguments made by Rosalind Krauss, Judith Williamson, Laura Mulvey and Jui-Ch’i Liu surrounding these film stills. The work at hand consists of a series of black and white photographs where Sherman plays the role of the director and the agent to construct an image and mise en scène that has an uncanny resemblance to 1950s snapshots of…

there was no real in depth study of how to read photographs within society. However, soon came the emergence of semiotics, which Burgin perceives brought photography to the forefront and shifted photography in terms of theory. Burgin references Roland Barthes’s Elements of Semiology and further explains that the study of natural language progressed into the study of visual language. Furthermore, by using semiology there was a means to explore photography in terms of codes and conventions,…

Lydia Davis is a well-known short story author who has her readers’ question whether or not what they are reading is what she meant. In her short story “What She Knew Davis writes about a woman who believes she is an old fat man and does not understand why a young man is flirting with her. A woman is questioning why a young man is flirting with her when she is clearly an old fat man. The setting is not clearly stated one can say that this interaction takes place in an outdoor setting. The theme…

techniques, such as shutter speed, aperture and ISO, etc. While still, in some great photography books, it is difficult to find any description about photography skills, such as the masterpiece, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. The author, Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, semiotics and structuralist, apparently referred the photography to the metaphysical height to think in the book. The essay is going to demonstrate my understanding about Barthes book, mainly focusing on…

Introduction The case of Blagojevich versus the United States involves Blagojevich being accused of a conspiracy to choose Barack Obama’s choice for senate seat in exchange for a job, giving the seat to Jesse Jackson Jr. in exchange for campaign contributions, trying to extort money from campaign contributions from Patrick Magoon who was the President of Children’s Memorial Hospital, and trying to extort money from campaign contributions from John Johnston, who was a horseracing executive.…