Initial Ideas

My Initail idea is that i think i would want to do the print task in making a music magazine, because i prefer desgining like a front cover and the contents and the layout of my magazine, and taking pictures and writing articles than videoing people, and then editing it because i dont really understand the videoing software. Also i would like to do the print task because i did a magazine last year for my GCSE piece and i realy enjoyed doing it, and i would like to get better at using the technolgy, and last year i enjoyed desiging the magazine and writing up the articles, which is why i would want to do a music magazine for the print task.

Roland Barthes Structuralist theory

As Barthes' work with structuralism began to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes' “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: ‘functions’, ‘actions’ and ‘narrative’. ‘Functions’ are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an ‘action’, and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key ‘functions’ work in forming characters. For example key words like ‘dark’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘odd’, when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or ‘action’. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture.
While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. The post-structuralist movement and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes' work exemplified. Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signified; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow.

Ferdinand De saussure

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying unchanging structure, which is based on the linguistic sign system of Ferdinand de Saussure. The structuralists claim that there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Hence, they say that everything that is written seems to be governed by specific rules, a "grammar of literature"[4], that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked. A potential problem of structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar Catherine Belsey puts it, "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference"[5]. An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death. Structuralist readings best focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.
Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and transformational grammar, posits both a deep and a surface structure. In Freudianism and Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and death instincts, and in Marx, the conflicts between classes that are rooted in the economic "base."
Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more recently, anecdotes, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth. As in Freud and Marx, but in contrast to transformational grammar, these basic elements are meaning-bearing.
There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism.

Evaluation

I think are presentation went well because it was very consistant with the theme which makes it seem like its all to do with the same presentation and what it is advertising, i think it was very bold, and would appeal too all ages in the school. I think are targets would be to put a bit more colour into are advertisments, and change are logo to something more creative.
I think are subject campaign was clear, as we had pictures of students upper and lower school reading and a teacher, which showed it is for the whole school as there was someone on the poster representing someones age, are banner, clearly showed it was for a literature festival, but i think are logo, should have made it more obvious it was for a lit fest and the poster could of had a bit more too it about english.
I think it does try too appeal to most of are target audience, with the pictures of someone from every area of the school in a picture reading, and also, because its quite plain but still kind of quirky it will get peoples attention, but then we had quite a few stars which didnt really represent anything, and sometimes that might of caught people eyes which didn't really show that it was for a literature festival.
i think are presentation had a clear ideology/ message, because it did represent reading, and that it can be fun, with like colours and the stars made it seem more fun and like there was energy, also it showed education because of the pictures and students and teachers reading, and i think it did show that it was fun for everyone to join in with nevermind your age.
The skills we used were photography skills, and paint.net also on publisher, also that we could work as a group and complete the task on time and to the best of our ability. Also we met the brief which was to design a poster banner slogan and logo, for the literature festival at chew valley school and i think we did that quite well.