Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-20 of 94 documents


1. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Peeter Torop

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

2. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Julia Kristeva

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

3. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Thomas G. Winner

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

semiotics of culture

4. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Andreas Schönle

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper seeks to evaluate the extent to which Lotman’s theoretical works could provide a conceptual articulation to the project of British and American cultural studies (CS). Just as CS, Lotman operates with an extensive concept of culture, albeit one mostly limited to nobility culture and focused on the past. His late works can be seen to articulate a semiotic theory of power: his emphasis on the relationship between center and periphery recalls the infatuation with marginality that underpins CS. Lotman shares the (post) structuralist premise about the primary role of discourse in founding reality. Yet his emphasis on the natural striving of culture toward diversity mitigates the subject’s dependence upon discourse. Thus, subjects act on their striving toward autonomy by playing discourses against one another, recoding them in an act of autocommunication that generates novelty in the process. Even though it denies the grand narrative, Cultural Studies emphasizes class, gender, and race differences. Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere emphasizes the ad hoc foundation of group identities, their emergence out of an intrinsic recoding of extrinsic codes, and the circulation of texts and values among groups. Lotman doesn’t privilege any sort of group identity and therefore offers a flexible framework applicable to a broader range of groups. In that sense he offers an alternative to Gramsci’s notion of the rootedness of groups in class realities (which underlies early CS).
5. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Andreas Schönle

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
6. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Leonid Tchertov

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Lotman’s conception of semiosphere opens the way to development of spatial semiotics as a special branch of sign theory. There are a lot of peculiarities in the spatial semiosis, which distinguish it from the temporal ones. These distinctions are connected with some special features of semiotized space, and they touch both upon the spatial texts and upon the spatial codes. The spatial syntax has its own specific structures, which can be reversed, non-linear and continual, created without discrete signs. The differentiation relates also to semantics of spatial signs and texts, which are mainly motivated by their denotates due to similarity or contiguity. There are some pragmatic peculiarities of the spatial semiosis: the greater connection with the praxis, on the one hand, and the greater ability for the preservation of the cultural memory, on the other hand. The mainly visual character of spatial texts in plane of expression can be also considered as its specific pragmatic property. These peculiarities give some special possibilities for the spatial semiosis and make necessary its participation in the various spheres of the culture, where diverse spatial codes interact in different ways between each other and with temporal codes as well.
7. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Leonid Tchertov

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
8. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Sadeq Rahimi

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
It is argued that (a) the question of ‘cultural logic’ is a valid inquiry for disciplines seeking to comprehend and compare mental processes across cultures, and (b) semiotics, as the science of studying signs and signification, is an appropriate means of approaching the question of cultural logic. It is suggested that a shift needs to be made in studying reasoning across cultures from the traditional value-oriented methods of judgment to a meaning-oriented assessment. Traditional methods of cross-cultural comparison are suggested to be flawed in their attempt to develop a psychological account of why different cultural societies can draw different conclusions from ‘similar’ data, because they typically do not take into account the culturally-specific processes of ‘meaning’ and semiosis. These processes, it is argued, cause input data to develop differentially from one semiotic context to another. In other words, before reaching the cognitive processing level data is already shaped by the semiotic context, thus what is processed cognitively by two individuals in two cultural/semiotic contexts is no longer ‘the same.’ A semiotically conceived notion of cultural logic is therefore a crucial factor in any cross-cultural study of cognitive and psychological systems.
9. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Sadeq Rahimi

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
10. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Irene Portis-Winner

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The subject of this paper is an introduction to my assessment of the work of the late American anthropologist, Eric Wolf (1923–1999), whom I consider to be one of the greatest American anthropologist. I plan a monograph on his total work from a point of view, largely overlooked, emphasizing his sensitive, path-breaking, and poetic insights. I see Wolf’s work as having three interpenetrating periods, which I call (1) Eric Wolf, the poet, focusing primarily on his work on Mexico, (2) the study of peasantry world-wide, emphasizing history, context, power, etc. (from the very beginning Wolf demolished the idea of static isolated cultures that anthropologists so loved to study; and in this respect, Eric Wolf changed anthropology forever), and (3) the third period, reaching to his death and never really finished, was Wolf the philosopher and crosser of boundaries.
11. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Irene Portis-Winner

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
12. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Massimo Leone

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Religious conversion revolutions the boundaries which delimit personal identity. Therefore, the main semiotic problem of mental and cultural representations of this religious phenomenon is to convey simultaneously a feeling of sameness and otherness, identity and change. In the present paper, mirrors are analysed as cultural mechanisms which enable representations to accomplish this paradoxical task. After a brief survey concerning literature on mirrors, some early-modern religious texts using these optical instruments as representative devices are analysed in-depth: a painting of the Magdalene’s conversion by Artemisia Gentileschi, an engraving representing conversion from a 17th-century French book, a fragment from Sainte Theresa’s spiritual autobiography, a passage from John Calvin’s Institution de la religion chrétienne. In its conclusion, the paper underlines the importance of Saint Paul’s metaphoric conception of mirrors for the cultural history of these objects, and tries to define the role which cultural semiotics should play concerning this kind of representative mechanisms.
13. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Massimo Leone

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
14. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Kestutis Nastopka

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The paper discusses the myth of the founding of Vilnius as an example of a myth of city foundation. The myth has received two independent semiotic interpretations. Narrative grammar procedures are applied to the analysis of the mythical story and the semantic code generating the story in the paper “Gediminas’ Dream (Lithuanian myth of city foundation: an attempt at analysis)” by Algirdas Julien Greimas (1971). The sovereignty ideology expressed in the myth, which describes religious and spiritual culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, is linked to the tri-functional model of the Indo-European social structure. The semantics of the Vilnius myth is seen as analogous with such Indo-European myths as king’s accession to the throne and creation of a city-state. The Lithuanian myth of Vilnius is linked paradigmatically to the Indo-European mythology in the study “Vilnius, Wilno, Vil’na: City and myth” by Vladimir Toporov (1980). At the level of the signifier, phonological equivalents of toponyms of Vilnius are traced. At the level of the signified, transformations of the “core” Indo-European myth are identified. The myth of the city foundation can be read both as a figurative form of cultural expression and as an ideology narrated as a plot of a story. In this view, the paradigmatic and syntagmatic approaches complement each other.
15. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Kestutis Nastopka

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

theoretical semiotics

16. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Mihhail Lotman

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The paper is devoted on the foundations of semiotics. It examines the specific features of Peircean and Saussurean traditions and demonstrates that the basis of all the differences is the different conception of the nature of sign: Peirce proceeds from the substitutive concept, Saussure from the bilateral one. The substitutive construction is atomistic by its nature: it is based on a (single) sign which replaces a (single) object, while bilateral is holistic: it is based on the sign system which is divided into (single) signs. The differences of semiosis in atomistic and holistic approach will be pointed out.
17. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Mihhail Lotman

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
18. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Marina Grishakova

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The problem of the observer and point of view is examined within the broad semiological and cognitive perspective. Structuralist narratology made an attempt of a formal-linguistic classification of points of view to avoid anthropomorphic-visual connotations inherent in narratological terminology. The alternative opportunity would be the usage of terms-metaphors as theoretical models. From the point of view of the observer, the process of text generation evolves in the double space of perception/conception and interpretation. Instead of comparing different media in terms of the privileged metalanguage, it would be more fruitful to base the comparison upon their immanent cognitive characteristics.
19. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Marina Grishakova

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
20. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 30 > Issue: 2
Peet Lepik

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The article examines the first phase of the universalistic interpretations in Juri Lotman’s semiotics, which is characterized by holism and maximalism derived from the Saussurean cultural concept. There is an analysis of Juri Lotman’s 1967 lecture, previously unpublished, where universal status is accorded to text functions (including magic functions). Such an approach is a substantial revision of the Saussurean understandings of the relationship between language and speech. This interpretation of magic is compared with the examination of the same concept in Juri Lotman’s 1981 article “Contract and self-sacrifice as archetypical cultural models”, which substantially contradicts the concept developed in his 1967 lecture. Both these magic models produce a number of objections, and apparently seem to bear the deforming traces of their respective universalistic theoretical schema.