Chapters 12, 13, & 14

Chapter 12:

Summary

This chapter discusses the the four elements that are involved in a piece of artwork. Abrams states that there is the work, artist, universe, and audience and it is all based around the work.
Berger writes almost the same thing as Abrams, but a little more updated. He uses the terms: artist, artwork, medium, audience, and America (society). Berger also talks about how these two models also relate to Laswell's formula: Who, says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?

Questions for Discussion and Further Research

1.) The four "coordinates" involving works of art for Abrams are Universe, Work, Artist, and Audience.

2.) Work: The artistic product itself
Artist: Human product-Artificer
Universe: the feelings towards the work
Audience: listeners, spectators, viewers

3.) I'm not sure, I don't really understand why he says this.

MY QUESTION: Is there an example where it shows that most theories only concentrate on one coordinate?

4.) First he tries to use all A's to catch the attention more, then he adds the point of the medium because thats how the theories get to other people, then he changed the Audience to America or the society because that is really what Abrams was going for anyway.

5.) He meant that how the message gets there is more important than the actual message itself.

Chapter 13:

Summary

This chapter is about the two way aspects of communication and dialogues. They talk about the anticipation during a conversation and what you need to remember while having a conversation. Intertextuality is mentioned, which is the strong relationships between texts being produced at any time.

Questions for Discussion and Further Research:

1.) He asserts that the word is born in a dialogue because everything in the dialogue shapes what else could be said.

2.) Dialogic means it was characterized by the dialogue. Dialogism focuses on the two-way aspects of communication.

3.) It is understand because of the other language being spoken, and the actual meaning is picked up amongst the other utterances being spoken.

4.) Intertextuality is the strong relationships between texts being produced at any moment in time and other texts that were previously produced.

5.) I think it would be hard for a work to never be intertextual because we discussed before how there are hardly ever any original thoughts because everything has been thought of before.

6.) This affects media because there aren't too many things they can do to surprise society and they have to stay within certain boundaries or nothing will seem real.

7.) I believe that conversation and dialogue are the same thing. They're both the interaction between a certain amount of people.

MY QUESTION: How can having a conversation/dialogue come so easy to us at such a young age?

Chapter 14:

Summary

In this chapter they talk about Labov's rules during a conversation and also the rule of narration how there has to be a beginning and an end. There has to be an order when there is a conversation or a story being told.

1.) Labov's six rules and examples are abstract (a fight), orientation (phone with mom), complicating action (I yelled, she yelled...), evaluation (we were both mad for no reason), resolution ( we both apologized), and coda (we're fine now).

2.) The order of events cannot be changed without effecting the meaning because the person hearing about the conversation or story would be confused.

3.) They can be considered a glorified conversation because it is like a longer conversation, just someone narrating what is happening in the story.

4.) I believe they do follow Labov's rules, but its just an elongated process.

5.) We tend to compare narratives to what is going on in the world. When we think of love, we think of the basic stories we were told when we were little.

6.) Narratives are very important for the mass media because it is kind of the understructure of everything else that is hitting society.

MY QUESTION: Why do we base everything off of narratives?