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Chapter Two: Semiology, Symbolicity, and Audio-visualLanguages in Guides

2.1 Introduction to Semiology and Symbolicity

Structuralism is a literary criticism that emerged during a French intellectualmovement in the 1950s. Structuralists attempt to create a semiology or science ofsigns in the textual analysis. Different from formalists who mainly conductclose-reading while disregarding the context, structuralists believe that meaning isoutside of words. “Meaning is always outside…meanings are attributed to the thingsby the human mind, not contained within them” (Barry, p. 52). The idea originatesfrom Ferdinand de Saussure who thinks that the meanings of words are arbitrary,which are merely assigned by human minds. According to him, language is a system of signs, and a sign has two aspects: a signifiant (a “signifier”) and a signifie (a“signified”). In other words, the signifier normally refers to the language and thesignified refers to the meanings human minds attribute to the language. Chandler(2017) defines the sign and explains what semioticians do with signs. According tohim, a sign is “something which stands for something else” (p. 2), and semioticiansstudy meanings through signs. Thus, when analyzing the literary texts, semiology isof frequent use and scholars try to find out meaningful signs in texts, so as to figureout the meanings of those signs and the sociocultural reasons behind those signs. Inthe study of film and television products, signs of traditional languages transform intoaudio-visual languages.

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2.2 Audio-visual Languages: Image, Sound, Story, and NarrativeMode

Nunning (2011) in his essay “Aspects of Film and Television Analysis” statesthat the three genres of cinema, television, and video are under the umbrella categoryof a “supermedium” called “audio-vision”. Different from the traditional literary textsusing words as their languages, television adopts the “audio-visual” language. He alsoproposes that there are four major elements in the film and television study, namely,the image, the sound, the story, and the narrative mode (pp. 144-151). These fourfactors together constitute meaningful signs for the audience to understand, and symbols, in particular, indicate generic social and cultural traditions and phenomena.

However, due to the fact that among four Guides, three of them are adaptedworks, though the basic structures of the stories resemble each other to some degree,the specific signs and symbols characterized by Chinese and Japanese cultures differgreatly. On the one hand, four Guides have thematic and narrative persistence whichcan be termed as “motif”. Thompson (1955) defines “motif” as “the elements whichmake up traditional narrative literature” and it “includes any of the elements ofnarrative structure” (p.19). The motif is the smallest unit in a story that can persist inthe tradition and has unusual and moving power. The motif has three major categories,they are respectively, the characters in the story, the background involved in the plot,and the event. There are two major motifs in the Chinese and Japanese episodes ofGuides, with the plot background--the symbiosis of “urban space and outcomers”, andthe characters and events--the deconstruction of “Cinderella and the Prince” fairy tale.

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