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The Old Clique : A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

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Everyone knows the old clique: A picture is worth a thousand words. This is maybe because it is harder to reject the physical reality of a picture then it is to dispute word that are written on a page. The picture is still language or else it couldn’t be worth a thousand words, but in some ways it is more free then text. It is more simplified. If you see a picture of a certain breed of dog it is easier to associate the name of the breed with how people think the breed should look then if you read about the breed and construct your own mental image. A picture is a strong way to appeal to people’s senses. A monument and memorials are like pictures. Monuments act as physical appeals to society’s senses in an attempt by various groups to gain authority from society. For example, if a person were to walk through the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. they could observe the end results of a long struggle for authority by politicians, designers, people with disabilities, and how authority has effected the role of women in the Canon of American History. Before examining the Roosevelt Memorial in depth it is important to first suggest how monuments can be more than just objects occupying a physical space. Monuments exist in a strange space between Structuralism and Post- Structuralism. Structuralism simplifies language down to signs. The founder of modern structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, said that every sign is made up of a signifier (the object,

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