| Abstract [eng] |
Focusing on the relationship between advertising and cultural context, this master's thesis formulates a research question: how does commercial advertising function as a text of culture? Departing from the conventional understanding of advertising as information about a product, service, or idea intended to boost sales, the study seeks to demonstrate that interwar Lithuanian advertising can operate as a text conveying broader cultural meanings of its time. The hypothesis – that advertisements published in the press during the years of the First Republic of Lithuania constructed a collective, norm-regulating code – is tested through the analysis of two specific cases: the advertisements for the toilet soap “Kipras Petrauskas” (1938) and the insecticide spray “Shell tox” (1931). The first part of the thesis establishes a theoretical framework for advertising analysis from the perspective of cultural semiotics. Interwar Lithuanian advertising is established as a semiotic object that meets the criteria of a text, such as dual coding, expression, structure, and boundary. It is argued that an advertisement, as a message, is first encoded in natural language (primary code). When transformed into a visual form – acquiring the code of a visual text (secondary code) – it gains additional semantic layers. The following section discusses the features of texts circulating within a cultural system as documents of memory. It is noticed that advertisements from Interwar Lithuania, as perceived by contemporary viewers, not only reflect cultural changes but also preserve and transmit cultural memory, thereby requiring a specific code for interpretation. The theoretical part is concluded by addressing the supplementary expression common to all cultural texts, including advertising. Furthermore, a definition of a text of culture as a combination of multiple codes is emphasized, recognizing its complex structure composed of fragments from other texts. The analytical part focuses on the advertising of the First Republic of Lithuania and the cultural values it embodies. Combining Lotman’s cultural semiotics with the Parisian school of visual semiotics, the analysis of “Kipras Petrauskas” toilet soap and “Shell tox” insect repellent advertisements confirm the hypothesis, revealing that beyond rhetorical persuasion strategies, Interwar period advertising produced cultural code, particularly promoting seaside holidays at the Baltic Sea as acknowledged cultural value within the sphere of culture. It is noted that printed advertising can be regarded as one of the texts generating cultural values, serving as a catalyst that stimulates and maintains the dissemination of collective values alongside other cultural texts. In the case of interwar Lithuania, the values constructed in advertising – work and leisure, unsanitary conditions and hygiene, pleasurable and fulfilling rest at the seaside – reflect the social and cultural transformations, achievements, and ideals of early 20th-century Lithuanian society. |
