Teets, 9/6/09

"A Short Story" For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn. --Ernest Hemingway

This example provided in class really tied together some concepts we covered during the first week. As the slides progressed, signifiers were either added or altered. While the changes were subtle, they always signified something else. Once we arrived at the final product, Dr. Casey had us develop a plot for a movie based on the 6 word poem, story, whatever. Everybody came up with one, most of which were drastically different. This tied in the concept that Macherey discussed, which was the power of silence.

The 6 words from the story were clearly explicit, and yet people developed totally different ideas for a movie plot. It was the words that were not there that spoke the loudest. In the story there are 3 sets of 2 words. "Baby shoes" was what people most used to develop their plot. Through the use of intertextuality, people pieced together a story that would be popular. Several action adventure plots were formed and a documentary as well. People take what they have seen in movies and read in books and essentially remake it in a different way artistically. This is what Barthes talks about when he defines trope.

In America our media outlets tend to repeat ideas over and over. Action heroes and documentaries are both popular ideas, so naturally we developed plots based around those ideas. These ideas are tropes, thus they are destined to be repeated. Copying a trope is a good way to piggyback someone else's idea to make a quick buck.

Back to the example. "To know the work, we must move outside it." (Macherey 20) We cannot know the author's intent for writing this piece. If we thought we could, we would be committing the intentional fallacy. Therefore, to digest and understand the work we must move outside of it. We must read what is not there, rather than what is there. Doing this can be difficult, sometimes impossible, but it is the only way to truly know what the work means. There is a rupture that occurs when trying to understand the intent and the meaning, and this i what must be studied to realize a work.