Today we reviewed Structuralism and spoke a little bit about how Derrida and Poststructuralism fit within the time-line of literary theories.
Module Code: IOCT 5003
Module Title: Digital Cultures
Semester 2
Academic Year: 2008/2009
Module Leader: Dr. Jessica Laccetti
Lecture Location: IOCT Main Lab
Contact Details
Room: 0.80, Gateway House
Email: jlaccetti@dmu.ac.uk
1 Module Description
This module gives an introduction to key ideas in critical and cultural theory that affect creative technologies and the creative industries. Areas covered include Modernism, Postmodernism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, Linguistic Theory, Anthropology, Reader-Response, Post-Colonialism, Multimodality, Hypertext Theories, Transdisciplinarity, The Ethnography of Cyberspace and Feminism.
2 Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module the students will demonstrate;
Increased understanding of critical theory and cultural context.
Detailed knowledge of key ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Increased understanding of the role of ideas in shaping technologies.
Ability to articulate theoretical concepts.
Ability to make critical analysis of cultural artefacts.
4 Assessment
Students may be assessed in any taught module on up to a maximum of two occasions, i.e. first attempt and reassessment. Please see section 4.2 for further information.
Assignments should be handed into the IOCT Office (Gateway House 0.80) by the date and time detailed below. Please remember to include a Receipt for Coursework form with your work – this will be your proof of submission.
Assessment: Essay
Volume of Assessment: 3000 words
Weighting: 100%
% Threshold: 40%
Due Date: (NOT YET CONFIRMED!): 01/05/09, (Week 16), 16:00
4.1 Criteria for Assessment
The assessment method allows the student to demonstrate his/her understanding of critical and cultural theory key to the creative technologies through an essay related to the areas listed in the module syllabus. The assessment relates to the learning outcomes by allowing the student to analyse and articulate theoretical concepts, demonstrating a detailed knowledge of key ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and an understanding of the role of ideas in shaping technologies.
The module operates to the generic University marking criteria which provide summative results and transcripts in the form of percentage marks.
“We know now that text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the author god) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."
"What is most often called 'relevant'? Well, whatever feels right, whatever seems pertinent, apropos, welcome, appropriate, opportune, justified, well-suited or adjusted, coming right at the moment when you expect it--or corresponding as is necessary to the object to which the so-called relevant action relates: the relevant discourse, the relevant proposition, the relevant decision, the relevant translation. A relevant translation would therefore be, quite simply, a 'good' translation, a translation that does what one expects of it, in short, a version that performs its mission, honors its debt and does its job or its duty while inscribing in the receiving language the most relevant equivalent for an original, the language that is the most right, appropriate, pertinent, adequate, opportune, pointed, univocal, idiomatic, and so on."(177)
"English writers write spoken English and American writers write spoken American. And the most striking thing of all is that their scientists, their scholars and their historians write an English that is the English of the man in the street, whereas in France, when it comes to science or history, we are still obliged to write in formal language. I want to write in a living language--in the language of the ordinary man. The language you want to write in is your so-called maternal language."
The moment of maximum freedom is reached by translation with Jacques Derrida's translation deconstructionist theory. That, even if Derrida's theory of translation states that it is enemy of the pursuing of freedom. Derrida's translation is free because it doesn't aim even to be free, because it overlooks any and all duty, be it philological or liberal, and revolts at any intention to communicate the prototext's content, to "imprecisely transmit an unessential content". In Des tours de Babel, of 1985, he enunciates the four principles of translation:
1. The translator's task is not revealed by any reception.
2. Translation has not as essential aim to communicate.
3. Translation is neither an image nor a copy.
4. Translation has no obligation to transport contents, yet must evidence the affinity between languages, must exhibit its potential (1985: 386-395).
Derrida's is a primordial translation allowed by the subjective interpretant sign, that has no aim to produce a text apt for being understood, that has no aim to communicate to the outside. A "free" translator is an exhibitionist who enjoys in flaunting his ability to translate his way. The Derridian translator is a narcissist, because he doesn't care about text except as a mirror of his bravura; he is interested in himself as capable translator.
