Summary: Week 2

Read the summary and the most important questions on Week 2

• 1 Summary

  This is a preview. There are 50 more flashcards available for chapter 1
  Show more cards here

• Key thinker: Simon Frith

  Frith is a sociologist and popular music scholar. He was born in 1946 in Great Britain.
  He looks at the rhetoric of music and how songs create meaning.

• Key thinker: Ferdinand de Saussure

  A Swiss linguist who lived from (1857-1913). His main innovation lay in a move from philology and etymology (studying where language and words historically, diachronically) to examine the structure of language in use (synchronic function).
  
  His work is known to be influenced by Marx.

• Key thinker: Sanders Peirce

  Peirce was an influential American philosopher of 'pragmatism'. He invented semiotics - at the same time as de Saussure his invention of semiology - to use signs to make sense of the world.

• Key thinker: Roland Barthes

  A French (1915-1980) literary critic and theorist who's innovation draws upon De Saussure his semiology as a means of understanding contemporary cultural texts s signifying systems in a particular context.

• Key thinker: Umberto Eco

  Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian academic. He has written extensively on the semiotics of literature and of popular culture.

• Key thinker: Vladimir Propp

  A Russian (1894-1970) theorist of the Russian Formalists. This is a school of literary criticism from the 1910s until the 1930s. They emphasise the functional role of literary devices and its originality of literary history. He states that narratives have a certain set of units which all appear at some point.

• Key theory: stereotyping stereotypes

  Tessa Perkins argues that there are multiple stereotypes about stereotypes. Including the idea that stereotypes are simple, about minorities, and negative and insulting. She also states that stereotypes are hold about groups with whom 'we' have little to no contact.

• Key theory: the burden of representation

  This theory addresses that groups who are frequently stereotyped, such as Dutch Moroccans, are represented less than groups who are not stereotyped as frequently.
  
  Representatives of these stereotyped groups are usually not chosen as representatives for their group. It is usually not something they admire, therefore it can be seen as a burden to be accountable for the group they represent.

• Key thinker: Karl Marx

  Marx (1818-1883) was a German theorist and socialist who spent most of his career in political exile because of his overtly revolutionary aims and practices.
  
  Marx his idea of the base and superstructure analogy is of significant importance for many researchers.

• Key thinker: Antonio Gramsci

  Gramsci (1881-1937) was an Italian journalist and political activist who's main contribution was to develop the Marxist idea of ideology via his concept of hegemony, in order to explain how dominant ideologies reinforced the status quo, and how they could be resisted and undermined.