This paper investigates the roles of Lebanese food, clothing, and other objects using a semiotic approach in an attempt to understand more deeply the Lebanese culture.
Abstract This paper explains that semiotics is the study of people and their culture through evaluating the signs and symbols the culture holds as important. This paper points out that the Lebanese society is divided into numerous sects, separated from each other by recognizable geographical lines of demarcation and, perhaps even more, by fear and suspicion. The paper relates that, in the Lebanese valley of the Bekaa, not far from where Romans venerated the god of wine, Bacchus, Bedouins are busy harvesting grapes for the new vintage of Lebanese wine.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Semiotics
Background Look at Lebanon
Objects
Food Products
Clothing
Conclusion
From the Paper "From Paterson, New Jersey, to Cairo, Egypt, a growing number of Islamic-oriented clothing stores and fashion shows are helping to promote a trendier look. Styles are even changing in ultra conservative Iran, where a dress code was imposed after the 1979 Islamic revolution. These days, more and more Iranian women are replacing the chador, the head-to-toe black garment, with headscarves and loose coats and slacks. Ziane Debebu(ph) is the agent for the five Tekbir outlets in Lebanon. He says the modern Muslim woman increasingly wants clothing that reflects her individual personality and tastes, especially here in fashion conscious Beirut."
Abstract The characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" are largely members of a falsely created American aristocracy. But some of the higher aspirations of this decadent elite for truth, beauty, and, more importantly, a secure sense of home and identity, mirror the far less decadent, but equally passionate desires of the members of the all-female book reading society found in "Reading Lolita in Tehran". This paper shows that Jay Gatsby desired to improve himself by "making himself up" to be worthy of the love of the faithless Daisy Buchanan. He did this through bootlegging, purchasing fine shirts, and securing a home in Great Neck, Long Island. The paper shows that, similarly, through a shift in attire and place, the women of Azar Nafisi's book wished to reinvent themselves by casting off their chadors and the external social and moral strictures that restricted them in their theocratic, Islamic educational framework.
From the Paper "The girls revealed the hidden colors of concealed banned clothing, from under chadors, colorful as Gatsby's fine shirts that he showed to Daisy, concealed in his drawers. ?Recovering himself in a minute, he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.? (Fitzgerald 91) Yet like these Iranian women, Jay Gatsby too has a hidden past and life, of his mundane Midwestern beginnings, as well as his criminal past. Gatsby keeps this boring past hidden life, filled with the shame of wealth he has not inherited, concealed under the colors of his shirts, while the women of Tehran keep their colorful plumage and reading a secret under cloaks of blackness that hide their faces and light. But like Gatsby, too, ?it was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile,? writes Nafisi. (Nafisi 145)"
