Semiotic Approach to "The Paper Menagerie"
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For your first assignment for COMM 1008, you will write a short essay in which you take a semiotic approach to "The Paper Menagerie," a short story by Ken Liu, originally published in 2011. [A PDF can be found in the "Assignment 1 documents" folder in the "Files" section of our Canvas site.]
Your goal is not to say what you think Liu's story means in the usual sense of reading a work of fiction and discussing plot, character, theme, and so forth. What you think Liu is trying to say, or whether you think the story is good or bad, or how you felt during or after reading it, are irrelevant to this assignment. Instead, your goal is look at Liu's story as a container of signs that produce meaning within the story.
The objective of this assignment is for you to choose, and apply, knowledge drawn from our course so far to show how semiosis - the making of meaning through systems of signification - takes place in Liu's short story.To do this, your job is to identify one or more signs and show how meaning is produced within a system (or systems) of signification. You can choose any sign(s) that you want, but your reader should clearly know what you have chosen, its significance, and how you are using it in your semiotic analysis.
Your essay should include a clear thesis (a claim about what sign(s) you are using and what you intend to argue with it), plenty of clear evidence (concrete examples drawn directly from Liu's story and from Chandler's text to support your claim), and a clear conclusion. Both Liu and Chandler must be cited in your essay to show your engagement with ideas from our course.
Essay Reguirements
All essays must be approximately 750 words (exclusive of endnotes), typed, double-spaced, using no larger than 12-point font and normal margins. Your essay must be carefully written, edited, and proofread for egregious spelling and grammatical errors. All essays must be submitted to Turnltln.com. Grading will be based on clarity of thought and expression, demonstration of learning drawn from our course, and overall persuasiveness of writing and critical thinking. Be sure to make correct use of quotations and endnotes/footnotes as appropriate.This assignment is worth 15 percent of your course grade.
NOTE: Plagiarism in any form is intolerable and will result in serious sanctions. If you are uncertain as to what constitutes plagiarism, please contact us to discuss.
Midterm
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“The Paper Menagerie” is a short story by Ken Liu that explores the reconstruction of Chinese American identity. Jack, a bi-racial son of an American father and Chinese mother, is initially delighted in the origami menagerie paper animals his mother makes for him. However, after an incident with his peer, who ridicules his paper menageries and ancestry, Jack distances himself from his Chinese heritage, including his mother. The teenage boy throws out the menagerie and even rejects his mother, who is slow to adapt to the American culture. Jack grows apart from his mother until he discovers a letter penned by his late mother, detailing her life story, on one of the menagerie papers. The short story covers several themes using the paper menagerie paper animal as the primary sign to convey ideas related to immigration, culture, identity, and connection. This essay will conduct a semiotic analysis of the origami menagerie paper animal as a sign. It theorizes that the paper animals that Jack’s mother makes for him convey several meanings and serve to illustrate the identity problems of the protagonist.
The Peircean model of the sign was developed by Charles Sanders Peirce as an account of signification, meaning, reference, and representation. Peirce’s account uses a triadic model of the sign. This includes the representamen (the physical or non-physical form of the sign), the interpretant (the interpretation of the sign in the observer’s mind), and the object (the sign’s reference). Together, all three parts of the triadic model make a sign. According to Peirce, meaning is not directly related to the sign, and semiosis resolves through the connection between the representamen, interpretant, and object (Chandler, 2017). In the Peircean model, the representamen and object are not directly attached, and the interpretant is an explicit component. A sign’s meaning is contingent on the setting since the object is not provided, and the observer has to infer. Peirce acknowledged that the sign could represent something other than itself. The sign does not always stand for its object but could also be a reference to an idea of the ground of the representamen. The ground is the specific setting or framework serving as the reference to which the sign i...