Exercises:

You will be explaining, for the next five days, what certain represented objects or scenes mean. You will be asked to look at some conventional “meanings” or readings, but are encouraged to improvise your own, using the methods of building them, or arguing for them, of traditional readings.

1. Do both (a) and (b): (a) Take a univocal sign equivocally (red light, arrow, “Exit,” a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle, etc.) and misread it creatively. (b) Take an equivocal sign univocally (leaf, pool, stream, hill, star, etc.) and turn it into something that functions like a red light.

2. Take a picture of some object that is isolated in some way from surrounding ones, or clearly in use by a person, and read it as an emblem. Interpret its pats, structure, use, or whatever, for moral or psychological purposes (i.e., what does it mean about our lives?).

3. Choose a still-life in one of the Yale art galleries. Without necessarily caring what the artist “meant,” read it–its parts, the “syntax” of placement of those parts, and so on.

4. Choose a landscape painting or print in one of the Yale art galleries. Give a reading of it, basing your method on what you did with the still-life, but expanding and adapting it to such matters as space, distance, height, etc.

5. Now, finally, take some actual scene–interior or exterior. After framing it off either with
your hands or imaginatively, describe it and then read it interpretively.