I haven't wanted to delete the original ideas that I had about the project, even though the final iteration has gone in a signficantly different direction, so I'll simply direct you to the work and move the ideas that I played around with below: http://english.ucsb.edu/grad/student-pages/cgniady/visual_pig/

OLD WORK:

The Long-nos'd Lass Project.

Team Member: Tassie Gniady

Introduction to Tannakin Skinker:

    Extant tellings of the hog-faced woman story from the seventeenth century will be approached and broken into constituent parts, or mythemes, according to Claude’s Lévi-Strauss’s paradigm as outlined in “The Structural Study of Myth.” I will also examine John Gower’s version of the medieval tale of “The Loathely Lady”  because it is presented in the pamphlet as a corollary to the tale of Skinker. Each variant will be mapped against the others in order to interrogate the elements of this story that cause it to be told over and over.

    Lévi-Strauss used this method to look at myths because he believed that:

Poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions; whereas the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation (210).

 

The differences in tellings of the hog-faced woman story across the seventeenth century do not present the problem of translation envisioned by Lévi-Strauss when contemplating the poetry, but an issue of changing societal values that may call into question the “timeless” value of all myths that Lévi-Strauss posits. Even though he believes that structural analysis should take into account all known variants and chart them (including even Freud’s treatment of the Oedipus myth as a version), Lévi-Strauss is confident that “a logical treatment of the whole will allow simplifications, the final outcome being the structural law of the myth” (217).

However, literary critics have long been skeptical of the universal applicability of structuralist methods. T.S. Eliot famously claimed that this type of analysis is of the “lemon-squeezer school of criticism.”  Yet, in direct contradiction of his earlier statement about poetry and distortion, Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobsen applied the method to a poem of Baudlaire’s with great success. In her essay “The Meaning of Myth” Mary Douglas claims:

When the lemon-squeezer is applied to poetry it has a high rate of extraction and the meaning flows out in rich cupfuls. Furthermore, what is extracted is not a surprise—we can see that it was there all the time. Unfortunately, something goes wrong when the technique is applied to myth: the machine seems to spring a leak. (201)

 

She goes on to critique the unambiguity that Lévi-Strauss claims for mythemes, in which he takes the analogy between Saussure’s analysis of language too literally. Instead, she argues, “The best words are ambiguous” and “When dealing with poetry, Lévi-Strauss gives full value to the rich ambiguity of the words. When dealing with myth, he suggests their meaning is clear cut…” (201-2).

    What, then is the best method to approach a story that has links to both literature and myth? None of the tellings of the hog-faced woman uses “high” literary style, so the benefits of the “lemon-sqeezer technique” may leave some meanings unexplored. This is where Jaques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” comes in. First, I will examine variants of the hog-faced woman’s story according to Lévi-Strauss’s method, to see if  a common structural law does emerge or if the diachronic nature of tellings reveals something more context dependent than Lévi-Strauss would like. Then, I will use Derrida’s concept of freeplay to re-examine some of the discrepancies that have arisen and to re-interrogate my theory about absent centers as highlighted by the Zizekian anecdote concerning the Romanian flag with its center cut out. Thus, the purpose of this project is twofold: it examines not only the most elemental units of the story of the hog-faced woman, it also questions the way in which oft told stories do reflect their surrounding cultures, despite the wish of structuralists to separate them from historical tradition. Finally, I will examine other iterations of the hog-faced woman which often lack narrative substance (such as fairground appearances in the nineteenth century) and look at the rise and fall in frequency of reports and popularity of hog-faced women. Taken together, a picture of what makes this strange story so enduring will emerge.

Digital Manipulation:

Gliffy Site with three Mythemic Diagrams

TAPor to look at the recurrence of terms surrounding Skinker

combinFormation to look at the evolution of images surrounding the hog-faced woman

SQL Server database that could feed different snippets to a web page based on some basic input parameters by the user

Work to do:

Good timeline creators as a possible way of hanging information off a line or circle, Simile is a possibility

Interactive/Active Visualizers for the free play section of the project (is this where SQL comes in?)

Integrate some of Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter, along the lines of the role of iterability:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance (95).

How do I intend to use this? Map the hog-faced woman with terms clustered around her visually as they refer to different parts of her body. Is the language really centered on her snout, asp expected? What body parts do matter here?