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Covering Music: Tracing the Semiotics of Beatles'Album Covers Through the Cultural Circuit

McGuire, Meghan S.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1112552888

Abstract Details

2005, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, English/Technical Writing.
Semiotics and visual rhetoric are a large part of technical communications. Technical communicators often use visuals within the documents they are writing and formatting. Visual rhetoric goes beyond the signs used for assistance; it's everywhere. One such example is album covers. Album covers are considered cultural images, but when looked at as a product, they travel through the cultural circuit. The cultural circuit looks to bridge the gap between cultural studies and technical communication. For this paper, the Beatles' album covers were used because of the great influence the band had on both music and visuals. Through a textual analysis of three Beatles' album covers; With the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles ("The White Album") and the other six top selling albums of those years (1964, 1967, and 1969, respectively), were analyzed to learn if the Beatles covers were visual examples of Mikhail Bakhtin's monoglossia, heteroglossia and polyglossia. This is important to discover since this theory is ubiquitous in society (i.e democrat vs. republican, comedy vs. tragedy), and can be applied to images as well as texts and ideologies. The conclusions stated that while, in comparison to six other album covers of those years, With the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Beatles can be considered heteroglossic or polyglossic, but after traveling through the cultural circuit, being redistributed by computers and rearticulated, they are monoglossic. However, since these covers have transcended from heteroglossic and polyglossic to become monoglossic, they are ultimately polyglossic, because they become their own genre, resulting in bricolage.
Gary Heba (Advisor)
57 p.
dialogic imagination; Beatles; album covers; cultural circuit

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • McGuire, M. S. (2005). Covering Music: Tracing the Semiotics of Beatles'Album Covers Through the Cultural Circuit [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1112552888

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • McGuire, Meghan. Covering Music: Tracing the Semiotics of Beatles'Album Covers Through the Cultural Circuit. 2005. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1112552888.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • McGuire, Meghan. "Covering Music: Tracing the Semiotics of Beatles'Album Covers Through the Cultural Circuit." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1112552888

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1112552888
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© 2005, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.