Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

54 reframing latin america
realist art because they thought they could understand it, but only an elite
few could truly appreciate the fi ner aesthetics of artistic abstraction, as it
was expressed in modern art.
Like Ortega y Gasset’s desire to fi nd the purest art form, essentialists and
hermeneuticians focus on the windowpane in and of itself, valuing most
highly the narrative that they believe reveals truths about the human condition.
Just as the purity of the glass improves our vision of what we see
through it, essentialists believe that the more precise or fl awless the author’s
narrative, the less aware we are of the author and the more we learn
about humanity. This does not mean the narrative style has to be simplistic
or obvious, as evidenced by Ortega y Gasset’s defense of modern art. After
all, Ulysses, the highly challenging work by James Joyce (1922), regularly
appears atop canonical lists of Western narrative.
In Framing the Sign, Jonathan Culler offers a cultural theorist’s approach
to the window metaphor. He compares the context and discourse surrounding
each work of art or narrative to the frame of a window. An important
distinction between Culler and Ortega y Gasset is that, as a cultural theorist,
Culler is not interested in revealing the most pure art form. He is looking
to expose the discourses that shape each narrative. Culler wants our
understanding of narrative to go beyond mere context, such as the historical
events surrounding the creation of a text. Instead, he encourages the reader
to consider the work semiotically by examining the role of discourse in it.
As he explains:
The expression framing the sign has several advantages over context:
it reminds us that framing is something we do; it hints of the frameup
(“falsifying evidence beforehand in order to make someone appear
guilty”), a major use of context; and it eludes the incipient positivism of
“context” by alluding to the semiotic function of framing in art, where
the frame is determining, setting off the object or event as art and yet
the frame itself may be nothing tangible, pure articulation. 4
Semioticians like Culler insist that the frame, the articulation, or the discourse
always mediates the scene or the narrative. A person who chooses to
focus solely on the glass itself, or the scene outside as transparent reality,
rather than also examining the elements constructing and refracting the image,
misses this crucial point. Whereas Ortega y Gasset and other essentialist
modernists believe that there are more or less accurate representations
of the human experience, Culler and other cultural theorists do not rank
narratives. Instead of assuming the existence of an ontological world and
then looking for narratives that reveal it, semiotic narratologists reveal how