Page 11 - Introducing Cultural Studies
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ow to do Cultural Studies: Semiotics
To understand how cultural studies is done, we need to equip
ourselves with a few of its key concepts and principles.
A major concept in cultural studies is that of sign. A sign has three
basic characteristics.
The physical form
of the sign is known
as the signifier...
This linguistic theory of the sign had its impact in the 1950s and 60s
as the intellectual revolution known as Structuralism which affected
anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, Marxism and much
else, and remains vital to subsequent post-structuralism.
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