Structuralism

This time we were focusing on structuralism and the binary opposition model.

With this we looked at opposites, for example we had:

Life - Death
light - Dark
Land - Sea/Sky
male - female
white - black
human - non human/cyborg

These weren't fully opposite, since males and females share more in common than have differences.

One I thought was quite remarkable, which I surprisingly had never heard of, was GOD and Devil. They were considered opposites and they also shared a sort of word play upon their spelling. God with an extra o is Good and Devil without the D is Evil.

They also had binary opposites in Films such as Frakenstein. Light - Dark, Sane - Crazy, Danger - Safety.

Binary opposites are used mostly in films to help exaggerate and highlight how drastic something is. An example that comes to mind is the Simpsons Movie. He states that he wants 10,000 tough guys and 10,000 soft guys to make the tough guys look tougher. Soft and Tough = Binary Opposites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDUR7YBSZ8o