Textual Codes Research Articles

The Gendered Politics of Postmodern Parody in Acker’s Great Expectations

This paper critically explores the gendered politics of Kathy Acker’s use of postmodern parody in her novel Great Expectations (1982). By using the textual codes and paradigms of postmodern parody, as theorized by Linda Hutcheon, Acker seeks to initiate a parodic appropriation of the Dickensian text in order to interrogate the culturally privileged gender norms encoded in this male text. Acker’s parodic rewriting of Dickens’ Great Expectations(1862) is really one of textual appropriation as it seeks to re-write the male text from a totally different, notably gendered, perspective. The aim of such an appropriation is to create a textual space to negotiate issues of gender and female agency. Acker seeks to challenge culturally established canonical narratives of male dominance. She does this by creating feminist counter narratives that bring to the fore issues of gender identity and difference. Keywords: Gender Politics, Postmodern Parody, Textual Appropriation, Intertextuality, Linda Hutcheon

The Evolution of a Writerly Text: Appropriating a Poststructuralist Application of Roland Barthes’ S/Z in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Post-structuralism is a literary movement that developed from the structuralism of Roland Barthes, and it is on this basis that the article chooses the spectrum of poststructuralist theory as its scope, and Roland Barthes’ theoretical approach as its benchmark. This article, inspired by the same revisionist spirit and empirical analysis implemented by Barthes’ poststructuralist reading of Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), aims to contribute to this new reading by approaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1926). Reading The Great Gatsby is a zeitgeist quasimanifesto for living in the twenty-first century; as we live in a majoritarian capitalist society with a continual stratospheric rise in materialistic egoism that it becomes a conduit for not falling into the ambits of capitalism. It gathers some of the poststructuralist aspects, and it is by utilizing Barthes’ six codes that it unveils a complex system of textual codes. Hence; in this paper, six codes of Barthes’ S/Z, (i.e.) the hermeneutic, the symbolic, semic, proairetic, referential and the cultural code will be applied and appropriated to the novel. Approaching from this point, the article next takes the analysis of the codes which will be discussed in tandem and regarded as profoundly significant to approaching a text; for Barthes foregrounds the codes as the raison d’etre for a text to writerly exist. By applying Barthes’ codes, it can be thereby corroborated that in poststructuralism, the reader deconstructs and decodes the paradigmatic and discursive kaleidoscopes that emulates a text, unearthing the inchoate mass of ideas.

Insta-hate: An exploration of Islamophobia and right-wing nationalism on Instagram amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in India

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light a crisis of racism and violence on social media by right-wing nationalists in India. Twitter and Instagram have become the online spaces to spew misinformation about the pandemic. Instagram pages such as Hindu_Secret and Hindu_he_hum have been unrelenting and vicious in spreading Islamophobic campaigns using the COVID-19 pandemic. This has opened up opportunities for targeting the Muslim community in India. This study positioned itself within the theoretical framework of Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory to uncover the visual and textual codes used to create stigma and blatant stereotypes that dehumanize and demonize certain communities using social media. This is an explorative inquiry that engaged in a semiotic analysis of the Instagram pages of Hindu_Secret and Hindu_he_hum. The study found encoded stereotypes of threat in the use of colour, religious structures, clothes and other physical markers of cultural identity in generating content for Islamophobia. Coronavirus was portrayed to have Islamic parentage in the memes; thus, it portrayed the Muslim community of nurturing and intentionally spreading the virus across India.

Lyric vídeos: el encuentro del videoclip con el diseño gráfico y la composición tipográfica

Este artículo tiene por objeto principal el análisis del lyric vídeo a fin de definir el formato como creación audiovisual comercial, describir el uso de los recursos formales relacionados con el uso del texto y, en un segundo paso, realizar una clasificación de los lyric vídeos en función de las variables consideradas en la metodología de análisis. El lyric vídeo es un subgénero dentro del vídeo musical que representa a través de códigos textuales íntegramente el contenido verbal de una canción, por lo general de manera sincronizada con aquella. Incluso como un formato de producción muy económica en cuanto a presupuestos, el lyric vídeo se ha convertido en un fenómeno popular gracias a su distribución a través de YouTube y otras plataformas de vídeo online. Para lograr los objetivos propuestos, realizaremos un análisis de contenido en una muestra de lyric videos, a partir de una metodología basada en las propuestas de diversos autores que atienda a la relación del discurso audiovisual con los códigos textuales y el diseño gráfico. Los resultados a los que llevan nuestro análisis destacan la naturaleza gráfica y digital del formato, en el que raramente se utiliza como recurso formal la imagen fílmica grabada de forma previa a la edición. De igual modo, los textos escritos aparecerían integrados en el discurso de manera extradiegética y alternaría diversas fuentes tipográficas, por lo general en movimiento, con objeto de lograr un alto dinamismo y así seducir al espectador.

Jeff Foxworthy’s Redneck Humor and the Boundaries of Middle-Class American Whiteness

Recent studies examine the use of rhetorical boundaries to produce intra-racial othering within whiteness. I expand this project by exploring the textual and social codes in Jeff Foxworthy humor that demarcate the boundaries between the redneck and the non-redneck. Such boundaries are complex, porous fault-lines that use symbolic pollution embedded in humor to stigmatize White outsiders. Social codes referencing symbolic pollution establish boundaries to define and insulate a normative, mainstream White identity from the intra-racial threat of redneck identity. This project provides a novel addition to whiteness studies by taking redneck humor analytically seriously and concludes by drawing comparisons between codes found in Foxworthy humor and those levied against rural Whites during the eugenics era.

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville by David Greven (review)

Reviewed by: Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville by David Greven Michael P. Bibler Greven, David. Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. vii + 250 pp. $104.45 hardcover. In this densely researched and provocative book, David Greven seeks to reinsert psychoanalytic theories of gender and desire into critical debates about nineteenth-century US sexualities that predate the emergence of our modern sexual categories as theorized by Foucault. Greven argues that the familiar nineteenth-century division of separate gender spheres inevitably produced feelings of gendered exclusion or dissociation in some subjects. He describes this gender disturbance in a number of antebellum literary texts that show how “an essential distance from one’s own gendered identity informs and perhaps even incites...sexual desire for others of the same gender” (17). These scenes of what he calls “gender protest” open pathways for a wider “sexual possibility” (5), particularly same-sex desire; and he illuminates these psychic processes of protest and possibility in detailed readings of Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and “Ligeia,” Melville’s Redburn, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. All of his readings are compelling, and two stand out as especially sharp: his reading of the same-sex attraction between a younger, quasi-fictionalized Margaret Fuller and the gender-aberrant Mariana in Summer on the Lakes and his analysis of Hester Prynne’s defiant, unbounded, and sometimes homoerotic desires in Hawthorne. Greven’s approach to these texts directly challenges the “historical materialism” (29) of other nineteenth-century critics (he singles out Christopher Looby) who, as he sees it, overstate the Foucauldian paradigm that homosexuality per se did not come into being until the end of the century. Arguing that these critics fail to provide a full or adequate theory of desire within their historicist readings, Greven shows how certain antebellum texts exhibit and work through structures of resistance, attachment, and mourning—feelings all rooted in the “pressure points, sites of anguish, frustration, narrow circumspection, and...loss” (23) experienced in gender protest—in ways that uncannily resemble or anticipate psychoanalytic theories, particularly those of Freud and Lacan. In this attempt to position psychoanalysis as “not categorically opposed” to “the ‘historical’” (33), but rather more complementary to it, Greven’s book makes a useful and important intervention in both the history of sexuality and American literary studies. Like the critics Greven challenges in his introduction, I am generally skeptical about using psychoanalytic theories of desire and subjectivity to discuss earlier periods and texts, as if literary characters were real persons and subjectivity itself were more or less universally consistent. And thankfully, Greven does not blindly apply these theories to the texts he reads, such as when he makes a refreshing and interesting “reparative” reading of Freud’s Dora in relation to The Scarlet Letter (210). However, sometimes his readings begin to feel unnecessarily complicated and technical, such as his discussion of the phallic mother in Poe’s “Ligeia.” And at other points Greven’s protest against the Foucauldian paradigm feels almost too insistent. He claims that “too much emphasis has been placed on the idea that same-sex desire and sex could not be named” (34), yet instead of mapping explicit accounts of what came to be called homosexuality, he continues to uncover those relations in textual codes and innuendo: “The apparent namelessness, unspokenness, and silencing of same-sex love and desire and sexuality was itself a kind of naming, a cultural code through which writers could paradoxically designate the love that did not dare to speak its name explicitly [End Page 272] but certainly found a number of other means of making its presence felt” (35). These literary strategies for speaking in code include theatricality and excess, depictions of “unruly affect” (35), classical allusion, and the use of race as an allegorization of same-sex desire, particularly in Poe’s Pym and Melville’s Redburn. And as with his use of psychoanalytic theory, Greven does not apply a narrowly uniform system of...

English

The aim of the present paper is to analyse intertextual relations based on activation of textual codes in the famous chain of works by Virgil (The Aeneid 1990), Dante (The Divine Comedy) that continues through romanticists and up to the modernist literature (T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets) taking T.S. Eliot`s essays on literature as the basis for our analysis. Homer`s Odyssey and Iliad serve as a hypertext for these works in which each author develops in his own way the thematic codes from the works of his predecessors thus affirming the continuity of a single cultural tradition -- “from Homer and within it…”.    Keywords: Cultural tradition, intertextuality, classics.

Gender Symbolic Messages in Music and Magazines Consumed by Young Mexicans

Music and magazines are methods of symbolic communication for youth, through which they receive and send concrete messages about social constructs of gender. The aim of this paper is to report the results obtained in the analysis of visual and textual codes in music and magazines consumed by young Mexicans daily. In general terms, the results show a wealth of meanings and values about sexual identity anchored in traditional stereotypes that in some way continue promoting violence against women.

Automatic Classification of Medical Images for Content Based Image Retrieval Systems (CBIR)

This paper describes the results after using an automatic classification method to help improve the retrieval of medical images. Using a large dataset of medical images, we established links between low-level features from medical images and high-level features from textual codes of Image Retrieval for Medical Application (IRMA). This paper also explains the process and methods used to automatically classify these medical images, and the results from the classification process. Our best classification results were on image modality with an error-rate of 1%.

Raising the Wind

Raising the Wind Sean Latham The opening essay in this issue of JJQ argues that editors, biographers, and textual scholars have been too quick to attribute a rather dubious piece of newspaper writing to Joyce. In "An Emendation to the Joycean Canon: The Last Hurrah for 'Politics and Cattle Disease,'" Terence Matthews meticulously argues that we have long been mistaken in our belief that Joyce actually published a short article on foot-and-mouth disease in the 10 September 1912 issue of The Freeman's Journal. Matthews makes a measured assessment of the available textual, historical, and documentary evidence, focusing on the newspaper itself and its role in the debates about cattle disease in Ireland. The result is a convincing claim that editors of both James Joyce: The Critical Writings and James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing were too quick to include this piece based upon some rather thin external evidence from Stanislaus Joyce. Although such a discovery does not go to the heart of the canon, it nevertheless reminds us that textual scholarship can still profitably attend to questions of genesis as well as genetics. This opening essay is followed by a pair of studies which each reflect in quite different ways on the virtual worlds created in and around Joyce's written texts. In "Possible Worlds Theory and the Fantasy Universe of Finnegans Wake," Margot Norris offers a daring and inventive new way for venturing into Joyce's most challenging work. Using the narratological tools of possible-worlds theory, she interrogates "the Wake's narrative and fictional operation" by rigorously analyzing the ways in which the book alternatively complies with and violates generic textual codes. Using chapter I.i. as a kind of laboratory, she explores how Joyce integrates elements of fantasy, actuality, and possibility to test the relationship between text and world. As a result, we are led beyond language and plot into the Wake's deep yet riven narrative structures. In "Ulysses on Web 2.0: Towards a Hypermedia Parallax Engine," Mark C. Marino takes us from possible worlds to virtual ones. Working at the intersection of Joyce criticism and the digital humanities, he meditates on the idea of an interface while speculating about the ways in which Ulysses might be remediated as a digital object. Following up on the wide-ranging discussions which accompanied Michael Groden's now stalled Hypermedia Ulysses, he focuses, in particular, on the problems of constraint and control. As he notes, "If [End Page 421] Ulysses solicits hypertext, the response to the solicitation threatens to be a nightmarish gathering, an onslaught of commentary, a vortex of links, a perversion, a black hole. What is worse, such a project might stabilize, cite, and annotate the text to death." These problems are themselves not unique; indeed, they are the same ones faced by any interface designer working either with the static structure of the printed page or the floating windows of the personal computer. Such decisions, however, have a profound effect upon the reception and circulation of a text, and Marino concludes by imagining a collaborative model of interface and commentary—a WikiUlysses or Joyce 2.0—in which user-generated editorial content can be organized yet prevented from stabilizing the text. The model he suggests is rich with possibility, but its application to Ulysses remains sadly stymied by copyright law, though prototypes based on Dubliners and A Portrait remain a rich possibility. The final pair of essays pursue very different ends, though intersect in quite surprising ways in their reflections on the economy and epistemology of love. In "Getting Past No in 'Scylla and Charybdis,'" John Gordon transforms a small, even inconsequential scene in Ulysses—Stephen's confession that he does not believe his own theory about Shakespeare—into the resonant center of the entire book. This simple "no," he argues, is a "wound of doubt," a generative "not yet" which ripples across and even beyond the text to entwine Bloom and Molly every bit as tightly as it does Joyce and Nora, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Ulysses, he contends in this elegant reading, is founded on a vortex of doubt and uncertainty created by an open question about love...

The construction of meaning and identity in the composition and reading of an architectural text

n this article, we present a case study of a student composing a significant text in a high school class. We focus on his inscription and representation of meaning in the textual codes and the ways in which those codes were interpreted by his readership, particularly his teacher. The text was an architectural drawing of a house that the student, Rick (all names are pseudonyms), designed to suit the life he imagined himself living. It embodied a particular meaning for him and a vision of how it would function in service of his conception of a good life. Critical aspects of that inscription were apparent to his teacher, Bill, following much discussion with Rick. Yet Bill read key aspects of Rick’s design as violations of common-sense rules for designing homes for the suburban housing market and consequently resisted, although ultimately accepted, Rick’s design as a viable text. The tension between Rick’s inscription of narrative meaning in his text and the meaning anticipated and read by his teacher—a tension that existed not only between student and teacher but also between the broader cultures in which each participated—served as the I

Media Literacy, Visual Syntax, and Magazine Advertisements: Conceptualizing the Consumption of Reading by Media Literate Subjects

A close reading of recent print ads reveals current trends or themes in the recombination of signs that attempt to keep one step ahead of a media-literate audience. The signs are not new, but the relationship between written text and visual representation is changing in reaction to the audience’s knowledge of how media is made. We offer a syntactic critique of how print advertisements work to create meaning for the media literate. This analysis reads texts for underlying cultural and ideological meanings and the anticipation of what subjects might already know about media creation. New conceptual tools are needed to chart these re-combinations of visual and textual signs and codes, specifically, sign paths, meaning momentum, conduits, and stylization.

Cultural Differences, Information and Code Systems

This paper explores an alternative way of framing information systems research on the role and impact of national culture. It argues that the widely accepted structural framework of Hofstede reduces interpretation to a simplistic categorical description which in many cases ignores differentiation within cultures. The alternative model suggests, that national culture can be better understood by seeking out the dominant codes that frame the discourse pervasive in a culture and understanding how that discourse affects the obvious social codes of ritual, custom and behavior and the textual codes which express the nature of that culture. This framework is applied to two different case studies—one in New Zealand and one in Thailand—to demonstrate its applicability.

Colonialism and Gender in the East: Representations of the Harem in the Writings of Women Travellers

ABSTRACT Edward Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse constructs a position of enunciation more questionable when the Western observer is female. Women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects. They accessed the Orient from a differently gendered perspective. Following Reina Lewis and Billie Melman, who suggest how female writers contested or subverted Orientalist discourse, this paper seeks to show that European women's texts, though shaped by race and class, could offer a counter-hegemonic viewpoint. Their writings about the Middle East and the harem challenge the dominant textual codes. Their empathy and receptivity co-exist with Eurocentricity. ********** Edward Said's well-known discussion of Orientalist discourse centres on the idea of the Other, 'a collective notion identifying us Europeans as against all those non-Europeans [...] the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European people and cultures'. (1) The traveller/observer accesses the alien or unfamiliar through various strategies contingent upon an imperialist position of Western supremacy, defining the foreign in terms of opposition (which often means negation or abstraction). Said's theories are dependent on two assumptions: first, that the sense of self against which the Other is positioned embodies the age's cultural hegemony, thus representing the dominant voice; and second, that the 'self' exists as a trope of positive function and value against which an alternative 'not-self' can be measured. As many feminist critics have pointed out, however, these theories construct the position of enunciation in colonialist or Orientalist discourse as essentially male, based on an East/West oppositional relationship as one of 'power, of domination', governed by 'a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections' and expressing 'a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different [...] world' (Said, pp. 5, 8, 12). Furthermore, Said argues that the Orient itself has a principally feminine cultural resonance, signifying a sexuality which is both desired and feared in the Western (male) imagination; Flaubert's representation of his Egyptian courtesan, possessed and voiceless, becomes a model here. Said's Orientalism clearly becomes questionable when the Western observer is female. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects and their accompanying ideologies. Moreover, while female travellers, as much as their male counterparts, may already have 'received' the East as a region of exoticism and promiscuous sexuality, through literary and pictorial representation as well as from ethnographic studies such as Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), it was not available to them as a site of heterosexual desire. At the same time, their gendered sense of selfhood, conditioned by factors such as the position of Western women within marriage and the nature of European domestic life, impacted upon their responses to the foreign Other. Said himself has acknowledged this skewing within his thesis. In a later revisionary article, he admits that Orientalism is not a monolithic and autonomous praxis, but relates to a larger enterprise or critique that includes feminism and women's studies. He also raises the question of 'how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power'. (2) This raises further questions. Do women, as much as men, render the Orient as Other? Are they empowered to speak with an alternative voice free from or subversive of the dominant (male) discourse? Or, to put it another way, are they more likely to establish a dialogic relation with the Other, in a way that erodes, instead of erecting, difference? …

Textual content, health problems and diagnostic codes in electronic patient records in general practice

Objective - To investigate textual content, health problems and diagnostic codes in everyday electronic patient records. Design - Retrospective and observational database study. Setting - Primary health care in Stockholm. Subjects - Twenty randomly selected general practitioners with 20 records each. Main outcome measures - The frequency of use of problem-oriented medical records. The number of words, problems and diagnostic codes. The completeness and correctness of the diagnostic codes. Results - About 14.5% of 400 studied records were problem-oriented. The mean number of words per record was 99.4, and the mean number of problems managed per record was 1.2. On average, there were 1.1 diagnostic codes per record and this differed widely among GPs and also among the electronic patient record systems. The mean number of codes per problem was 0.9, and the proportion of correct codes was 97.4%. Conclusions - The electronic patient records in general practice in Stockholm have an extensive textual content. A vast majority of the problems are coded and the completeness and correctness of diagnostic codes are high. It seems that problem-oriented electronic patient record systems enforce coding activities. It is feasible to establish a database of diagnostic data for research and health care planning based on electronic patient records.

Book of the Undead

Book of the Undead

Cybernetic Explanation as a Theory of Reading

This is the idea of a code: an array of rules and protocols linking one semiotic level to another and thereby regulating the passage between symbolic states or phenomena. Although antecedents for the idea can be found in classical theories of language, widespread use of a terminology of coding seems to date only from the decades following the end of World War Two, when cybernetics first came into its own as a field of research and for a time generated considerable excitement in the human sciences. In literary theory and textually oriented semiotics the single most important channel for the idea and the nomenclature seems to have been the work of Roman Jakobson, who drew upon both cybernetic terminology and the earlier vocabularies of Russian and Czech Formalism.' Whatever its exact provenance, the idea of codes and coding is now integral to a number of otherwise disparate ways of thinking about textual phenomena. Codes are most often invoked as the mechanism connecting the syntactic and semantic levels of some language system (or, in other terminologies, connecting signifiers and signifieds, expressions and contents, and so on). They serve somewhat more metaphorically, but with comparable frequency, to explain the processing of larger units of discourse (the reading of an entire work, for instance), such as when the move from an initial reading to a subsequent, more satisfactory understanding is said to involve recognizing subtler or more comprehensive textual codes, or when the entire act of reading is considered a kind of decoding process. Still more generally, the idea of coding plays a prominent role in textually oriented social theory, where cultural codes are invoked as the means by which action and thought are organized within complex social systems. In spite of the widespread adoption of the idea of codes and coding, however, even advocates of its explanatory force sometimes find the notion as troubling as it is seemingly indispensable.2 As an account of how meanings and effects get produced in a text or textlike cultural formation, codes explain at once too much and too little. They explain away too readily the very regularities we would like to understand

Polygraphia and the Renaissance sign: The case of Trithemius

The Polygraphia is marginal to the language reform that philologists and grammarians undertook in the sixteenth century. Etymology, pronunciation, and orthography were disciplines that, each in its way, struggled to introduce order into the chaotic vernacular. By contrast, ciphers raised to an art the natural property of language to dissemble. In a time in which the scholastic, exegetical model became problematic, the Polygraphia offered a model that was both artful and pre-scientific. It taught the art of dissembling meaning through the use of codes and ciphers, but it also introduced the notion that meaning could be retrieved by applying a law, or ordering principle, to the coded text. It is not surprising that secret writing was the object of experiments by some of the same scientific minds, such as Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon, that also experimented with such ocular instruments as telescopes, microscopes, and even bezicles. Or that nature should later be construed by Galileo as a script of signs to be read. The scientific mind knows that appearances hide the secrets of nature, just as textual codes hide meaning. As a deliberate fabrication of chaos, cryptography reminds us of that fact. In a sense, cryptography is a magical subverting, then reinstating, of order. Just as Prospero, the Renaissance magus, created tempests to enact the power of his art, but then calmed the winds to show his power over his dominion, the Renaissance cryptographer worked at scrambling letters, at creating a semantic storm, the better to return his reader to the calm of transparent meaning.

The Pictorial Representation of Sports on Television

A textual analysis of sports on television focusses on the semiotic codes these broadcasts are composed of. The sports broadcast is then considered to be an autonomous, textual reality which differs from the sports event in structure and function. An investigation of three popular television sports (football, tennis, cycle racing) demonstrates which textual television codes are being articulated. This analysis makes clear that sports on television serves three fundamental, textual functions: providing a fascinating illusion of reality, supplying surplus information and dynamizing the original sports event into an entertainment spectacle. By deploying these textual strategies, sports broadcasts on television have developed a "vraisemblance" which has gradually detached itself from the original sports event.