My senior thesis is due this semester, and the date is quickly approaching. I’ve been using the working title “Poor Reception”, as a sort of joke - because I’m using cell phone technology and because no one really thought I could pull it off.
So as of late I’ve been thinking about what to title the actual piece. I’m currently working with the idea of catharsis by proxy. Basically the fact that by watching and emphathising with another’s pathos, we can be moved as individuals. Hollywood and the entertainment industry thrive from this.
In doing research in contemporary art history, one is inevetiably confronted with the works of Jacques Derrida and his influence in the structural and post-structuralist work, as well as art and literary criticism. One idea I kept running into was Textuality.
From Wikipedia:
Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text (a technical term indicating any communicative content under analysis) as an object of study in those fields.
More over:
The word “text” arose within structuralism as a replacement for the older idea in literary criticism of the “work,” which is always complete and deliberately authored. A text must necessarily be thought of as incomplete, indeed as missing something crucial that provides the mechanics of understanding. The text is always partially hidden; one word for the hidden part in literary theory is the “subtext.”
Hummm. Now how do we apply focus to this subtext? How can we study the study of subtext?
Again from Wikipedia:
In epistemology, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata is data about data (who has produced it, when, what format the data are in and so on).
Therefore I propose as my new thesis title, Meta-Textuality: Catharsis via Proxy.
Ooh, sounds intimidating.
