post class 9-12-10

A discussion I found enlightening in our last lesson was Barthes notion that 'is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes' (108). I found this part of the lesson very interesting because I had an enormous amount of trouble taking the text for its denotative meaning as a truthful statement and kept connotatively applying the words to a body of work, of writing. I though the lesson was based on the writing and learning how to read text through Barthes' passage but didn't really put together that looking at this statement as what it is would have any benefit. This struck me as a recurring problem for me - seeing things denotatively - as I had the same problem during my summer internship at an ad agency in London. I have trouble simplifying things in my mind because I am always looking for the most scholastic reasoning to put forth on paper. I had difficulty pulling my mind back in both this in-class lesson and in my internship and in retrospect find it funny that I have time seeing the denotative reasoning for things because I feel so trained to see the connotative and produce some enlightening reasoning for things where none lies. In my internship the trouble I had was in wording phrases too scholastically, as in the ad business simplistic articulation reigns supreme and I had an enormous amount of trouble adjusting to this. I find myself constantly using large vocabulary words I've read or looked up when I've read them and not known the definition and putting together the most complex way to articulate something when the simplistic is more straightforward and easier for everyone to read. I had trouble separating the connotative and denotative meanings on this quote in particular in class and although my subjective denotative meaning - looking at a girls low cut shirt and (for lack of a better term) wondering what lies beneath - was immediately apparent to me, I subdued it to explain what I thought was the scholarly answer to the question. I feel like as college students we are (and if not us, certainly me) trained to see things scholastically, looking for the most complex way to articulate a simplistic subject and in this case and in my real world application this notion has proved a fallacy. The denotative, put simplistically and articulated easily is seemingly always the right answer. The fluff, the excess words, the extra structure is not necessary when you can say the same thing in half the words, structure and useless meandering.