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SECL Lectures and Seminars – Spring Term 2010
Professor Elizabeth Ezra (University of Stirling), ' Cléo's Masks: Exoticism and the French New Wave'
The French New Wave, which flourished roughly from 1958-1962, coincided with the height of the Algerian War, and although the war itself was notably absent, at least on an explicit level, in many of the New Wave films, assumptions about cultural hierarchies manifested themselves in subtle ways in these films made during the death throes of France’s colonial empire. This paper focuses on the role of masks, in their physical presence and in their metaphorical resonance as a means of disguise in the veiled representation of unpalatable current events. More generally, it examines the larger dynamic of masquerade used by New Wave directors to explore the process of cultural objectification.
Professor Laurence Goldstein (University of Kent), 'The Varieties of Ambiguity'
A single sentence may have many interpretations—a source of irritation if one is drafting a legal document, a source of inspiration if one is writing poetry—and there are many sources of ambiguity. Brevity is a virtue, yet one of the penalties of conciseness is the possibility of ambiguity. So there is sometimes a tension between saying it brief and saying it clear. In normal conversational situations, conciseness is achieved and misinterpretation avoided by the invocation by speakers of aspects of the particular conversational situation. So one needs to distinguish what proposition a sentence expresses when occurring in a certain context from what the sentence means when divorced from context. Surprisingly, this simple distinction holds the key to solving a number of theoretical problems.