Introduction and rationale

Rationale and theoretical background Let’s talk about how language works for a bit.

Freud ’s work has been discredited in psychology, but there are two the concepts in his body of discourse are still influential in the field of linguistics and literary theory. In 1915, he claimed that there are two processes that occur in dreams: condensation and displacement. I’ll let him speak for himself:

“Condensation is brought about by (1) the total omission of certain latent elements, (2) by only a fragment of some complexes in the latent dream passing over into the manifest one, and (3) by latent elements which have something in common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream”  (p. 25).

Displacement occurs when “a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by something more remote - that is by an allusion… [and] the psychical accent is shifted from an important element on to another…” (p. 27).

Condensation happens when psychological concepts get superimposed on or are substituted for one another, and displacement is the act of evoking a psychological concept by focusing on another one. As you can imagine, no matter how interesting they are, such claims are difficult to sustain in science. However, these two dream processes seem similar to two things that we constantly do in our daily speech.

In 1957, borrowing from and building on Freud’s and Roman Jakobson’s work, Jacques Lacan linked metaphor to condensation and metonymy to displacement (p.70 – 71).

Here is a brief reminder! Metaphor: the act of comparing two or more objects by substituting or superimposing one over the other.

Metonymy: the act of describing an object by speaking about an associated idea or object or one of its components.

Modern English is a language comprised of ‘dead’ metaphors and metonymies that we overlook in our speech because we have become so inured to them. After all, when was the last time you had to blow off some steam after a day of dealing with your inbox?

I would say that the same applies to any language at all. If you don’t believe me, try it out for yourself!

But then, what is language? I am not going to be able to answer that question here when the likes of people ranging from Aristotle to Saussure to Rorty have not been able to either, but maybe we can all agree that language involves reading, listening, writing, and speaking – that is, communication. Every member of every community uses one or more languages to communicate, and every community has its own regional discourse and terminology; every community has its own communal language that may or may not be distinct from that of another community.

As someone (unhealthily?) focused on reading, Stanley Fish would claim that we all belong to “interpretive communities” (p. 304), each of them possessing, to borrow Iser’s words, “a repertoire of familiar literary patterns and recurrent literary themes, together with allusions to familiar social and historical contexts… [and] strategies used to set the familiar against the unfamiliar” (p. 200).

As English speakers, we belong to a certain interpretive community that shares these interpretive tools to read, watch, and listen to linguistic manifestations, including but not limited to novels, poems (yes, yes), TV shows, movies, commercials, podcasts, live streams, and YouTube videos.

As literacy teachers, I believe that we should be cognizant of what interpretive communities our students belong to and also be aware of the predominant medium in which they communicate.

<p class="MsoNormal">I believe that the most prevalent interpretive community our students belong to is not that of the classroom nor their extended family or neighborhood. It is the internet, a discursive domain with an entirely different set of interpretive strategies and linguistic repertoire from the classroom and IRL (in real life). I believe that as literacy teachers, we are obliged to improve our students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, predict, infer, evaluate, and make connections in this linguistic medium. After all, media literacy is part of the Ontario language curriculum.

<p class="MsoNormal">At this point, it is only fair to mention Dr. David Crystal, a proponent of Internet Linguistics.

<p class="MsoNormal">Crystal has written extensively on how internet users communicate, and he has spoken many times on how texting or the use of instant messaging programs may or may not affect the literacy and language skills of students. .

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<p class="MsoNormal"> <p class="MsoNormal">For this wiki, I would like to explore the idea of internet memes – a form of internet communication - and the possible roles they can play in the classroom.I believe it would not be a far stretch to characterize a meme as a hybrid condensation and displacement of meaning; it is a simultaneous occurrence of both metaphor and metonymy that is far more concise and succinct than even the “textese” that Crystal discusses in his book, Texting: the gr8 db8. However, even more so than “textese,” communication through memes relies strongly on the established fluency and familiarity of its users in its familiar discursive patterns and recurrent themes, and I believe that literacy teachers would benefit from learning more about how memes work. <h2 class="MsoNormal"> Relevance to literacy instruction <p style="margin:0cm0cm0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;">Ontario's media literacy strand<span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:16.5pt;"> has four overall expectations:  <span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:16.5pt;">Students will

<p style="margin:0cm0cm0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:16.5pt;">1. demonstrate an understanding of a variety of media texts;

<p style="margin:12pt0cm;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">2. identify some media forms and explain how the conventions and techniques associated with them are used to create meaning;

<p style="margin:12pt0cm;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">3. create a variety of media texts for different purposes and audiences, using appropriate forms, conventions, and techniques;

<p style="margin:12pt0cm;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">4. reflect on and identify their strengths, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful in understanding and creating media texts.

<p style="margin:12pt0cm;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">As mentioned, memes are a hyper succinct narrative form, capable of communicating a vast amount of information both expressive and informative in a very short amount of time, and they are becoming a more and more prevalent aspect of online communication among children, adolescents, and even young adults.They might even become the discursive center of online communications in the future. Does that sound unbelievable? Consider the current prevalence of textese - it is present in everyday communications, even in the most professional of contexts, and it can be seen in popular culture and even in real life. Consider the number of teenagers who actually say - verbally, with their physical mouth, tongue, teeth, and vocal cords - "ell oh ell" (LOL) instead of simply laughing.

<p style="margin:12pt0cm;line-height:16.5pt;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">With that said, wouldn't understanding how memes work be useful for literacy teachers, given the four overall expectations? A meme is a media text with a highly fluid set of conventions and techniques that a netizen must still be familiar with at least on an intuitive level  to use and comprehend effectively. They can be used for a variety of purposes and audiences. They can even be placed in a sequence to create a highly efficient and succinct yet content-rich narrative. <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:16.5pt;">It would not take a large leap to extrapolate the relevance of memes and their narratological potential to the other four strands of Ontario's curriculum.

<p class="MsoNormal"><u style="font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;">Works Cited

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;text-indent:-36pt;">Fish, S. (2000). Interpreting the variorium. In D. Lodge and N. Wood (Ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory <span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;text-indent:-36pt;">(pp. 287-306). London, UK: Pearson.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-36.0pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;">Freud, S. (2001) .<span style="font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;"> From introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In P. Rice and P. Waugh (Ed.), Modern Literary Theory (pp. 24-33). New York, NY: Oxford.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-36.0pt"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;text-indent:-36pt;">Iser, W. (2000) The reading process: a phenomenological approach. In D. Lodge and N. Wood (Ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory <span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;text-indent:-36pt;">(pp. 188-205). London, UK: Pearson.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-36.0pt"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;text-indent:-36pt;">Lacan, J. (2000). The insistence of the letter in the unconscious. In D. Lodge and N. Wood (Ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory <span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10.5pt;line-height:115%;text-indent:-36pt;">(pp. 62-87). London, UK: Pearson.

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