SOC 202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Polysemy, Reception Theory

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 202
• Professor: Graeme Metcalf

Document Summary

The visual entertainment of the image- moving or still- in pop culture promotes a fascination with meaning systems. It"s able to produce anxiety around the power of images: the coercive or influential power of images within pop culture in terms of meaning, interpretation, subversion, ideology etc. affects the viewer. Pop culture is bound up in meaning and image and thus presents and provides new ways in we can determine and construct meaning. Cultural studies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text and drawing conclusion about the changes in textual phenomena over time. Oppositional , not only within their own disciplines but to many of the power structures of society at large. Third, cultural studies denies the separation of high and low or elite and popular. Finally, cultural studies analyzes not the cultural work, but also the means of (mass) culture production .