Conversations with Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature and Cognition (review) (original) (raw)
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Marek Tamm & Peeter Torop (eds), The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022
Juri Lotman (1922–1993), the Russian-Estonian literary scholar, cultural historian and semiotician, was one of the most original and important cultural theorists of the 20th century, as well as a co-founder of the well-known Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics. This is the first authoritative volume to explore Lotman's work and discuss his main ideas and intellectual legacy in the context of contemporary scholarship. Boasting an interdisciplinary cast of academics from across the globe, the book is structured into three main sections – Context, Concepts and Dialogue – which simultaneously provide ease of navigation and intriguing prisms through which to view Lotman's various scholarly contributions. Saussure, Bakhtin, Language, Memory, Space, Cultural History, New Historicism, Literary Studies and Political Theory are just some of the thinkers, themes and approaches examined in relation to Lotman, while the introduction and Lotman bibliography in English that frame the main essays provide valuable background knowledge and useful information for further research. The Companion to Juri Lotman shines a light on a hugely significant and all-too often neglected figure in 20th-century intellectual history.
The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics
(“Paul Cobley is not only a leading figure in semiotics and communication theory, but also a strong promoter of interdisciplinarity in all domains of human scholarly endeavor . . . Semiotics and linguistics are vibrant, ever-changing sciences. But they are difficult ones to understand directly. This Companion will certainly help the reader learn much more about them in a concrete and highly intelligible fashion” Semiotica 141 (1/4) (2002): 351-376; “Paul Cobley, who provides the clear and informative introduction, previously edited Routledge’s Communication Theory Reader (for our review of this, see EJC, 12(3), 1997). He has put together a similarly interesting collection here, and students are likely to find it as useful as the earlier volume” European Journal of Communication 17 (1): 144 (2002)).
2012 From Theory to Analysis: Afterthoughts on Cultural Semiotics more
academia.edu
Jurij Lotman's definition of culture as "the totality of non hereditary information which is accumulated, stored and transmitted by various groups within human society" is the assumption that informs a good deal of today's research in anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics and semiotics. Albeit with vast overlapping areas, each field delves into different aspects of the relation between human beings, external environment (including other human beings) and cultural mediation, applying various specific methodologies to analyze an array of cultural objects, thus shedding light on the cognitive, textual and social structures and mechanisms that the objects in question imply. What is the semiotic contribution to our understanding of how culture works? What sets a Semiotics of culture apart from similar disciplines and approaches: a certain way of focusing on the object of analysis, a set of hypotheses about the way in which cultural phenomena are communicated, a specific understanding of the concept of "culture", a particular investigative method, the rigorous adoption of a technical metalanguage as a guarantee of a scientific approach...? What kind of questions do semiologists ask when confronted with the analysis of cultural artifacts, and what methods do they apply in a bid to answer those questions? Such are the issues underlying the current issue of Versus.
Review: Semiotics Continues to Astonish
Linguist List 23(733)
In the late 1960's Abraham Maslow remarked that communication studies were being carried out "too exclusively at the sociological level and not enough at the biological level" (1966: 1 36). He may have been surprised to learn that a movement seeking to correct this imbalance was already underway. The movement's visionary, Hungarian American linguist Thomas Albert Sebeok (1920-2001 ), was a man whose contributions to ethology, linguistics, anthropology, and modelling systems theory came to be typified in two terms - 'semiotics' and 'biosemiotics' - the latter a development of the former. Semiotics is the mode of inquiry Sebeok championed; Biosemiotics is the field of inquiry he established. The volume under review is written as a Gedenkschrift to him on the 1Oth anniversary of his death, its title borrowed from a passage by Sebeok which offers the following assessment: "Despite its venerable pedigree, semiotics, as practiced today, continues to astonish. Behind its every revelation an abeyant illusion lurks; but behind every mirage, confounding reality lies dormant. The dynamic of semiotics is immense in scope, seemingly all-encompassing" (1986: x).
PalArch's, 2023
This study explores the semiotics of language in English dialogue, hoping to decipher the complex method by which meaning is constructed. The study delves into how the cultural and contextual comprehension of communication in English is facilitated by evaluating a wide range of linguistic indicators such as phonological markers, lexical choices, accents, idioms, proverbs, and metaphors. Interview and survey data can be analyzed qualitatively to reveal recurrent themes and patterns that tell us more about the social and cultural meanings of words and phrases. The results have implications for linguistics and semiotics, highlighting the power of semiotics in determining how we understand what we hear in English.