1/28/2004   slide 3
Semiotics—
Lecture Roadmap
•Basic theory and terminology
–Saussure, Peirce, examples
•Applications of theory
–Use in advertising
–Ideological critique
–Semiotics in discourse theory and Barthes’ mythologies
•Limits of semiotic theory
–Inherent limits
–Social/political/academic issues
There are entire courses on this, will we just be scratching the surface.

Goal is to give you a sense of why semiotics came to be,
what is has to offer in a pragmatic (i.e., practical way) for you as a viewer and maker of images
and what the limits of the theory are: why other approaches are needed as well
(which will help to explain why this is one of 24 lectures instead of providing a framework for the whole VDL endeavor.)

Althusser, Barthes, Benjamin, Berger, Brecht, Foucault, Freud, Gramsci, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Marx, Saussure, and many more
Linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychology, etc.