University Mohamed I, Media Studies

Faculty of Letters Semester 4 Gr: 7-

8 English Department
Prof: M. Elkouche
Oujda

Key Concepts: Language – Text

• Language:

- Language is probably the most important element in culture because it is the

chief means of forming and expressing meanings. It is language which mostly
differentiates humans from animals, and without it culture itself may have no
sense or existence.

- It is also the most important concept in both cultural and media studies
because most texts and discourses are constituted and communicated
through it.

- Language enables humans to form knowledge about themselves and the social
world. It is the main vehicle of socialization or inculturation.

- Language is not an innocent or transparent medium that reflects things or

reality objectively; it is rather ideological. As Chris Barker explains:

“For cultural studies, language is not a neutral

medium for the formation and transfer of values,
meanings and forms of knowledge that exist
independently beyond its boundaries. Rather,
language is constitutive of those very values, meanings
and knowledges.”

• Text:

- Generally speaking, a text refers to the different types or forms of written

material or documents; eg. Books and newspapers etc.

- In Cultural Studies, as Chris Barker notes, “a text is anything that generates

meaning through signifying practices. That is, a text is a metaphor that
invokes the constitution of meaning through the organization of signs into
representations.”

- “This includes the generation of meaning through images, sounds, objects (eg.
clothes) and activities (eg. dance or sport)”… All these are “cultural texts” and
can be thus “read as texts.”
- Meaning is usually generated through the arrangement of signs and symbols
in the texts. These are discourses and representations that need to be analyzed
and deconstructed so as to see and uncover the cultural assumptions or
ideologies they might contain.

- Texts are often open to interpretation and multiple readings. These readings
can even be contradictory, in some cases (eg, some readers of Heart of
Darkness find J. Conrad as colonial; others see him as anti-colonial).

- Intertextuality is the relationship that might exist between two or more texts.
Barker notes that it “refers to the self-conscious citation of one text within
another as an expression of enlarged cultural self- consciousness.”