Viewing+in+context

include component="comments" page="Viewing in context" limit="20" url}?f=print|print this page =INTRODUCTION= tocViewing is a process that is not simply about the conventions of the specific deployment of techniques by the text's creators; it is about exploring the ways that the meaning of the text is dependent on the contexts in which it was produced and received.Below are several examples of texts that demonstrate the way that meaning shifts when the context in which the text is received changes.

=CASE STUDIES=

Thích Quảng Đức

 * The two images below represent the same event but their contexts are entirely different. Discuss the significance of context to the impact of these two images in the discussion forum above. **

The photo below was taken on June 11, 1963, depicting the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. His suicide was in protest of the oppressive regime of the US backed Catholic President Diem, who persecuted Buddhists. The image caught worldwide attention.



The image below is from the 1992 self-titled album cover for the band, Rage Against the Machine.



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Marilyn Monroe reading //Ulysses//
The image below is of the iconic Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's novel, //Ulysses//. Monroe was an actress who often played the blonde stereotype in her films while Joyce's novel is arguably one of the most difficult novels to read in the English language. The photograph was taken by Eve Arnold at Long Island in 1954.

The author, Jeanette Winterson, wrote the following response to this image in a newspaper column called "Solitary Pleasures" where various women explained their favourite pictures of women reading. //This is so sexy, precisely because it's Marilyn reading James Joyce's Ulysses. She doesn't have to pose, we don't even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don't often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It's not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover's talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it's true, but what we're spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we're not being asked to look at Marilyn, we're being given a chance to look inside her.//

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O.J. Simpson
The magazine covers below followed the arrest of the famous American football star, OJ Simpson, who was tried and acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman. These covers, however, provide an insight into how race can become a factor in shaping responses to events.



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