Literary Criticism
Class #3
“Semiotics,
Structuralism,
and Television”
from Channels of Discourse (1996)
by Ellen Seiter

I. The Sign
(pp. 138-143)
Saussure
The Sign
Signified
(signifié):
a concept
Signifier
(signifiant):
a sound-image
(or a written mark)
“Arbor”
Charles S. Peirce
1839-1914,
“A sign
American philosopher
is either an icon, an
index, or a symbol” (Peirce on
Signs, 239).
“icon”
Where
the sign resembles its
referent, e.g. a picture of a
ship, a map, a road-sign for
falling rocks
“index”
Where
the sign is associated . . .
with its referent
They rely on a material connection
between signifier and signified
e.g. smoke as a sign of fire, clouds
as a sign of rain, symptoms of a
disease, photographs
“symbolic”
Where
the sign has an
arbitrary relation to its
reference, e.g. language
Group Activity
Apply
Peirce’s theory of
signs to FIVE examples
below. What kinds of signs
are they?
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Food for Thought
What
are some of the
similarities and differences
between Saussure and Peirce?
Seiter
notes “Semiotics reminds
us that with nonfictional
television, no less than with its
fictional counterpart, we are
dealing not with referents but
with signs” (142).
Any examples of your own?

II. Denotation and
Connotation (pp. 143-145)
 Please
review our discussion on
Barthes in Class #2.
 Seiter argues that “One of the goals of
semiotic analysis of television is to
make us conscious of the use of
connotation on television, so that we
realize how much of what appears
naturally meaningful on TV is actually
historical, changeable, and culturally
specific” (144).
 Seiter’s
examples:
The color of light (pink for
femaleness, white for goodness)
Music (minor chords and slow
tempos signifying melancholy, solo
instrumentals signifying loneliness)
Photographic technique (soft focus
signifying romance, hand-held
cameras signifying on-the-spot
documentary)

Another example: the space shuttle Challenger
Denotation
Connotation
(Ideology)
Connotation
adjusted
(after the
explosion)
Signifier: Signified:
TV image Space shuttle
The sign
Signifier
Signified:
scientific progress,
manifest destiny in
space, US superiority
over USSR
fallibility of scientific
bureaucracy, waste of
human life, basic human
needs sacrificed to
technocracy

III. Combination and
Codes (pp.145-146)
Steiter
looks at TV as a
communication system and
identifies five channels (codes?) of
communication: image, voice,
music, sound effect, and graphics
(logos, borders, frames, diagrams,
and computer-animated materials).
(146)

IV Structuralism
(pp. 147-154)
Seiter
cites Hodge and Tripp’s
analysis of Fangface as an
illustration of the structuralist
approach.
“Hodge and Tripp argue that
cartoons—widely considered on of
the lowest forms of television—are
surprisingly complex.” (147)
Fangs
Fangface
Whenever Fangs sees the moon, a picture of the moon, or
something that resembles the moon, he transforms into
FANGFACE. He is unaware that he is FANGFACE.
Sometimes when he changes back, he remembers
something that he did as FANGFACE, but he just
dismisses it as a weird dream that he had. He is a coward
and runs whenever there's danger.
“Hodge
and Tripp find that
the nature/culture axis is a
highly significant one in the
world of Fangface” (151).
“One
can look . . . at the larger field
of children’s literature, animated
television, and commercial culture
and find that the nature/culture
division, or the blurring of the two,
is a central characteristic of
children’s media.” (151)
 “The
figures of the werewolf in Fangface
and Splinter (who is simultaneously a
Japanese Ninja master and a rat) in
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are products
of different historical moments and different
racial ideologies. Does the use of binary
opposition nature/culture to analyze
these cartoons obscure important
differences by being too universalist?”
(151)
“Terry
Eagleton has
remarked that one of the
primary drawbacks to
structualist research is that it
is ‘hair-raisingly unhistorical’”
(152).
“A historical
approach to the
animated television series
would also allow us to
contextualize and explain the
kinds of changes that can be
observed in different series from
the 1970s to the 1990s . . .”
(152).
1970s
Cartoon
Fangface/
Scooby Doo
Adventurers Human beings (a
token female)
Settings
The small town
The countryside
Villains
Mad scientists with
Russian or German
accents
Mystery, horror films
Genre
1990s
Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
Few humans
(no females)
Manhattan
Tokyo
Japanese
technocrats
Martial arts/sci-fi
“For
if signs are conventional, they
are also changeable. But semiotics
remains silent on the question of
how to change a sign system.
Stubbornly restricting itself to the
text, it cannot explain television
economics, production, history, or
the audience” (153).
In
conclusion, Seiter suggests that
we think of semiotics and
structuralism “as a kind of useful
exercise for making sure that we
know our object before venturing
out into other models of study”
such as “questions regarding
audience activity and the play of
television as discourse” (153).
The
End