TASK2

Task2

Task2

Eco's work in semiotics answers to a insight that the development of mass newspapers drastically changes the situation of connection and heritage in the twentieth century; but it continues foreign to the widespread idiom of Media and Cultural Studies regardless of echoing, anticipating, or passing some of their most fundamental advances. Successive parts focus Eco's condemnation, circa 1964, of the customary dichotomy between 'high' and 'popular' heritage, his development of a form of mass connection which emphasises discussion of significance rather than its imposition on assemblies, and this model's openness to a critical idea of subjectivity acquainted by psychoanalysis as well as by initial work in narratology and aesthetics. Yet this work of reconstruction would be pointless, were not the situation of mass connection which the task locations furthermore, insofar as they form its sign and transmission between nationwide heritage and markets, powerful obstacles to its audibility.

Eliasoph

In the early nineteen eighties, the United States began to struggle openly with the question of cultural diversity. School board meetings attracted media attention when they erupted into major battles over the curriculum, and visibility continued to escalate to a high point in 1987 when Jesse Jackson joined a student rally against the "Western Culture" curriculum at Stanford University. As the issue became more politically salient at the national level, the U.S. cultural elite began to face new questions and new political roles. Once charged only with the clerical mission of distributing consecrated knowledge, cultural professionals now perform an acknowledged role as policy-makers who define appropriate reactions to cultural diversity--especially as it pertains to race. Ethnic discrimination and racism are subjects which often put white, middle-class environmentalists in Europe and the US on the defensive. "What does racism have to do with us?", is one unspoken question. If pressed, some greens insist that environmentalism concerns itself with a future common to all humanity, and is therefore by definition race-neutral, class-neutral, "neither left nor right" in the fashionable phrase. Others claim that environmental science is only about "nature", not humans and their squabbles. Many feel that ethnic discrimination need not be a big worry for greens since surely it is something practised only by ignorant bad guys. Environmentalists, the implication is, are much too well-educated and well-brought-up to fall into such low-class atavisms.

Multiculturalism and the redefinition of racism are phenomena that permeate many facets of contemporary American life from kindergarten to corporate culture, but the shift has been particularly apparent in English departments where questions of race translate directly to curriculum decisions, reading assignments and teaching methods. Furthermore, English departments have had to face these issues head-on before a national audience. As a discipline, literary scholars have a theoretical apparatus with which to understand the issues and to fuel debates in other arenas.

At least one major survey has found that curriculum changes intended to address diversity have affected English more than any other discipline (Levine and Cureton 1992), and when media coverage of debates relating to race in the college curriculum focus on a particular ...