As a first blog post, I’m a little leery on whether or not I’ll answer the subject correctly, or even remain on subject. As such, I’ll begin with a lot of uncertainty but at least with quite a few things so say.<\/p>\n
Evocative and representational meaning. At first, I couldn’t differentiate exactly what was meant by this, but now with about two hours hindsight, I can relate that to the topic. Words and meaning – or overall, language – are subjective and ever-changing. In semesters past, I’ve been assigned to read Shakespeare, novels or poems that all dated from far before the 1900s; and upon reading all of them (or at least most, when it came to crunch time) it was then suddenly the light went on about how much language changes and adapts overtime. With blogging, or the new media-laden world, we’ve once again hit a dynamic crossroads.<\/p>\n
Relating all this to the three examples presented in class, each gives a different perspective on the topic of this blog assignment.<\/p>\n
For one, as we discussed in class, the “Orson Whales” video was static in that it was unchanging. It can be repeated innumerable times and never, ever change. The only person capable of changing the video would be the author his or herself. But! Despite the medium itself not being capable of change from outside forces, its meaning can forever be argued.<\/p>\n
This is the power of literature, regardless of whether or not it’s old media. People have argued the meanings, symbolism and characterization of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” for over 150 years. Yet the story itself – it’s text, pages and all its characters and letters – has remained the same (for the sake of argument and not delving into library research, we’ll assume that the novel hasn’t changed significantly overtime from one published or revised edition to another). Other classic novels have gained this notoriety: “The Scarlet Letter,” “Frankenstein,” “Great Expectations,” or even more modern Sci-fi classics such as “Brave New World” continue to appear in academic classrooms for discussion and study. Regardless of what a medium is, it would seem that the meanings<\/em> of its content can forever change as long as there is a subjective human mind to interpret it and lend opinion.<\/p>\n But about evocative <\/em>and representational<\/em>‘s place in this blog – the three new media examples can also be argued for years to come (pending on how long the Internet sticks around in this form) about what they exactly mean, or what the author intended. Perhaps the most dynamic of them all, “Firefly,” can be argued most, simply because an outside user can almost limitlessly rearrange the poem’s order, and therefore conjure a new meaning.<\/p>\n So what did the author of “Firefly” mean to do by presenting the poem is such a format? What is the intended, or representational, meaning behind this new media text? I could argue that it is the last two lines, which read, “for what he has to say \/ is not for me.” No matter what order a user decides to place all the lines of text, the ending’s last two lines remain the same. Surely, then, the represented meaning of this poem is just as stagnant?<\/p>\n No.<\/p>\n Due to the ability to rearrange the poem as one sees fit, the last two lines are just as subjective as anything else in the poem. The evocative meaning, or what the user decides those two lines mean, are reflected in what text the user decides lead up to that point in the poem’s story. Who is “he?” What is “he” saying? Who is the speaker, “me?” All of that is evoked in the poem the user gets to create. The represented meaning is whatever the author has stashed hidden away.<\/p>\n At the beginning of typing this post, I enable the JABBER window and left it in the background to play. Since then, it’s conjured the words “hoppit,” “eynalarch,” “usetons,” “golizong” and many others. I toy around with the idea of resetting it and seeing whether any of those words will ever repeat themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a first blog post, I’m a little leery on whether or not I’ll answer the subject correctly, or even remain on subject. As such, I’ll begin with a lot of uncertainty but at least with quite a few things so say. Evocative and representational meaning. At first, I couldn’t differentiate exactly what was meant … Continue reading Blog #1: Evocative and Representational Meaning<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[10,12,11],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-evocative","tag-meaning","tag-representational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}