ISI Library

Other title information: a critique of the deconstructionist movement in postmodern thought

Annotation: This book interprets Derrida and looks beyond deconstructionism. It is a critique that identifies a pervasive flaw in Derrida's thinking: the semiological reduction that permeates deconstructionist theory and postmodernism in general. The critique focuses on Derrida, but its conclusions may be applied to other major figures in the postmodern tradition who espouse the variant of Saussurean semiology that reduces all meaning to the signification of signs. This book challenges the philosophy of deconstruction at its roots, and does so on the basis of a diligent reading of central texts and an understanding of the tradition of Continental philosophy providing the context for Derridian thought

Identifier: 079142376X

Status: Available

Annotation: An overview of semiotics applied to different topics, such as media, communication and aspects of everyday life like food or clothing

Identifier: 1551300273

Status: Available

Other title information: Sign Evolution in Nature and Culture

Annotation: The all-comprehensive scope set by the topic of Origins of Semiosis necessarily encompasses a great thematic diversity. The disciplinary horizon of the contributors to this volume is also highly diverse: it extends from anthropology to zoology and from linguistics to visual aesthetics. Unity in this diversity may be provided by the transdisciplinary framework of semiotics which guides the authors' explorations in the evolution of semiosis, even though the framework of this volume is by no means one of a unifying school of specific semiotic theory.

Identifier: 3110141965

Status: Available

Annotation: An impressive synthesis of semiotics and anthropology which puts human experience in a new light. Deely gives us the foundation for a new paradigm for anthropology.

Identifier: 0847678040

Status: Available

Other title information: An Anthology of Readings

Annotation: The purpose of this anthology is to provide students taking semiotics for the first time, as well as the general reader, with material that will give them an overview of what semiotics is an does. Classic works, such a R. Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics, C.S. Peirce, Logic an Semiotic: The Theory of Signs and S.K. Langer, Discursive and Presentational forms, as well as original pieces wirtten specifically for this antology, allow the student a glimpse into what semiotics is, who some of its founders and practitioners are, and how to think semiotically.

Identifier: 0551300044

Status: Available

Other title information: Introducion a la semiotique generale

Annotation: Le languge veut être ingnoré. C'est sa destination naturelle d'être un moyen et non une fin - et ce n'est qu'au prix d'une violente conversion que la recherche peur être dirigée vers ce que est le moyen même de la connaissance. Cette conversion que fut le fait des linguistes ne devait pas mettre fin aux dérobade du langage. Elle conduisit à transporter au sein mêeme de l'objet de sicence-angage de même distance sacrée, cette fois à l'égard des phénomènes du sens. Leur immédiateté, leur naturelle évidence étaient le plus sûr rempart de mystifications dont pouvait s'entourer le langage.

Identifier: 2130448593

Status: Available

Annotation: Les intermittences du sens, c'est ici, tout d'abord, une pluralité d'pbjects en tous genres (romans, nouvelles ou poèmes, en françauis ou en anglais; discours littéraires, échanges de lettres, bribes de conversation courante; pratiques quotidienne ou objets esthétiques) que traverse et que scande le retour d'une même question: celle de la signification de son surgissement, de ses modes de manifestation et même, peut-on dire, de ses agissements. C'est aussi de point en point et de part en part, le jeu réglé des singularités et des récurrences, l'alternance des espèces constituées et des morphologies en devenir, l'entrejeu des discontinuités et des enchaînements, sur le support, el la dynamique des places et des forces. C'est, dans l'épaisseur des textes, l'échange réversible entre l'espace vectorisé oû les figures se déploient et le substrat figural que y imprime sa prosodie et ses contours. C'est enfin et surtout à la caçon de l'accompagnement qui lie la partition, l'interrogation sur le ses du sens: non pas tant sa saisie que sa poursuite et plutôt que sa fuite, sa fugue. The intermittences of meaning are here, first of all, a plurality of objects of all kinds (novels, short stories or poems, in French or in English; literary discourses, exchanges of letters, snippets of everyday conversation; daily practices or aesthetic objects) that cross and that are punctuated by the return of the same question: that of the meaning of its emergence, of its modes of manifestation and even, one might say, of its actions. It is also from point to point and from one end to the other, the regulated play of singularities and recurrences, the alternation of constituted species and morphologies in the making, the interplay of discontinuities and sequences, on the support, and the dynamics of places and forces. It is, in the thickness of the texts, the reversible exchange between the vectorized space where the figures are deployed and the figural substrate that its prosody and its contours imprint there. It is finally and above all the way of accompaniment which links the score, the questioning of the meaning: not so much its grasp as its pursuit and rather than its escape, its fugue. (Translated with Google Translate)

Identifier: 2130445225

Status: Available

Other title information: on the Limits of Language and Literature

Annotation: Evoking Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse, Horst Ruthrof brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom.

Identifier: 0253349958

Status: Available

Other title information: A Walk in the Semiotic Wilderness

Annotation: This study is an outgrowth of a deep respect for Peirce's thinking and a desire to understand him as fully as a non-polymath can. It seeks to explore Peirce's Semeiotic, as he called it, and to articulate how deeply his tri-relative logic pervades his thinking.

Identifier: 3110126338

Status: Available

Other title information: Our Perfusive, Persuasive Universe

Notes: 1st book in trilogy "Signs Becoming Signs)

Annotation: Signs Becoming Signs evinces a broad transdisciplinary perspective based on the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce. The universe as a perfusion of signs incessantly spilling forth into other signs- evolutionary, processual, ongoing semiosis- resists precise conceptualization. As within St. Augustine's time, we might somehow fleetingly experience it, sense it, almost know it, but upon our attempting to say it, it will already have sublimated into unknowing: thus the breach between our 'semiotically real' world and the 'real', between our incorrigible ideals and our real capacities.

Identifier: 0253337461

Status: Available

Other title information: from word to culture

Annotation: Occupying a still evolving but clearly established place in 20th-century intellectual history, Mikhail Bakhtin is best characterized as a philosopher of dialogue or human communication. The book approaches its subject by concentrating on problems of language and literature

Identifier: 0333556321

Status: Available

Annotation: Alla gångbara cynismer och sofismer om konstnärliga schabloners ofrånkomlighet och subjektets undergång i vår komplicerade massmediala värld etc sopas bort av Bachtins enkla uppmaning att konsten på allvar, att svara på det tilltal som riktas mot en: "För det som jag förstått och upplevt i konsten är jag skyldig att ansvara med mitt liv, så att allt det som jag upplevt och förstått inte skall vara verkningslöst i livet." All common cynicisms and sophisms about the inevitability of artistic templates and the demise of the subject in our complicated mass media world, etc., are swept away by Bakhtin's simple call to take art seriously, to respond to the appeal that is made to one: "For what I have understood and experienced in art, I am obliged to be responsible with my life, so that all that I have experienced and understood shall not be ineffective in life." (Translated with Google translate)

Identifier: 918577209X

Status: Available

Annotation: S/Z is the linguistic distillation of Barthes's system of semiology, a science of signs and symbols, in which Balzac's novella, Sarrasine, is dissected semantically to uncover layers of hidden meaning.

Identifier: 0631176071

Status: Available

Other title information: Interdisciplinäre und historische Aspekte

Annotation: This collection of papers explore interdisciplinary qualities of semiotics and it's historical development.

Identifier: 3883395552

Status: Available

Notes: Translated by Anna Cancogni, introduction by David Robey

Annotation: More than twenty years after its original appearance in Italian, The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.

Identifier: 0674639766

Status: Available

Other title information: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation

Annotation: It is a consequence of the ways in which problems in philosophizing about language have currently come to be dominated by semiotic issues that we now, more than ever, tend to study language as some form of evocation of the world. This book, grounded in this global perspective, may be read as an attempt to answer the question: what sort of picture of the world is irony? The overall response that we arrive at is that the discourse of ironic consciousness is a (self-) reflexive engagement with the world rather than any unilateral objective representation of it.

Identifier: 089925330X

Status: Available

Other title information: actes de la décade tenue au Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle du 4 au 14 août 1983

Annotation: Fruit d'une décade tenue au Centre culturel de Cerisy en 1983, l'ouvrage réunit une quinzaine de contributions que sont autant de signes d'ouverture de la part d'une discipline en cours d'évolution. La mise en question porte à la fois sur les postulats (philosophiques et épistemologiques) de la sémiotique, sur ses méthodes (notament face à de noveaux domaines d'investigation comme la musique ou l'architecture) et sur ses enjeus (en particulier quant au status du "sujet" - suje d'énonciation, suject "analytique", sujet de l'interaction sociale). Avec une importante intervention d'A.J. Greimas, que répond ici, sur un ton quasi improvisé, aux questions de l'assistance. Débat avec Paul Ricœur.. The result of a decade held at the Cerisy Cultural Center in 1983, the book brings together some fifteen contributions that are signs of openness on the part of a discipline in the process of evolution. The questioning concerns both the postulates (philosophical and epistemological) of semiotics, its methods (notably in the face of new areas of investigation such as music or architecture) and its challenges (in particular regarding the status of the "subject" - subject of enunciation, "analytical" subject, subject of social interaction). With an important intervention by A.J. Greimas, who answers here, in an almost improvised tone, the questions of the audience. Debate with Paul Ricœur. (Translated with Google translate)

Identifier: 2905572051

Status: Available

Annotation: On Signs opens up semiotics to a broad, nonspecialist audience. Here the founders of the discipline, along with some of the leading "signmakers" of contemporary culture, undertake to explain the signs in subjects as diverse as El Salvador's death squads and ladies' lingerie, the letters of Pliny and the windows of Tiffany's, fashion, food, film, jokes, psychoanalysis, and history.

Identifier: 0801830079

Status: Available

Notes: With an introduction by H. W. Schmitz

Annotation: This is the facsimile 1911 reprint of Victoria Lady Welby’s very last publication Significs and Language. The Articulate form of our Expressive and Interpretative resources. This volume also includes two major essays from the author’s hands, ‘Meaning and Metaphor’ (reprinted from The Monist 3:4, 1893), and ‘Sense, Meaning and Interpretation’ (reprinted from Mind 5:17 and 18, 1896), and a selection of several noteworthy and unpublished essays. In the introduction to this volume the editor H. Walter Schmitz exemplifies how Lady Welby developed her significs in discussion and cooperation with numerous highly divergent scientists and scholars of her times; how her ideas influenced other scholars in Europe and the US; and how significs sank to near oblivion and was finally recovered.

Identifier: 9789027232755

Status: Available

Notes: Originally published as La revolution du langage poetique (1984), translated by Margaret Walker, introduction by Leon S. Roudiez

Annotation: Her aim here is to investigate the workings of "poetic language" as signifying practice, that is, as a semiotic system generated by a speaking subject within a social, historical field.

Identifier: 0231056427

Status: Available

Annotation: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language comprehends the entire tradition of the doctrine of signs, threading its way through the symbolic and allegorical readings of the Holy Scriptures, the varying insights of the fields of philosophy and rhetoric, and into (and out of) the various positions of modern literary criticism. Individual chapters are devoted to the nature of signs; the theory of definition; the cognitive function of metaphors and symbols; mirror images, painting, film, and television; and the role of inference in the interpretation of texts

Identifier: 0253351685

Status: Available

Annotation: In this erudite and imaginative book, Umberto Eco sets forth a dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts.

Identifier: 0253111390

Status: Available

Annotation: La théorie sémiotique n'a rien de spectaculaire. Un travail infiniment lent guide ses pas; et cependant les horizons symboliques qu'ell perment de saisir "d'un seul coupl d'œil" s'étendent chauqe jour. A quoi convinientůel d!attribuer un tel pourvoir de synthèse? L'etude des concepts profonds des langues naturelles montre qu!ils sont une sorte de mise en mémoire des comportements humains fondamentraux. Ainsi se révèle une rationalité tout autre, dont il n'avait pas été tenu compte jusqu'ici. Que faut-il attendre d'une exploracion systématique et démonstrative de ce "sens humain"?

Identifier: 213037736X

Status: Available

Annotation: Through the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and others, the kindred disciplines of semiotics and structuralism have stirred enormous interest within European and American intellectual circles in recent years. With their focus on the ways in which signs, symbols, and cultural phenomena of all kinds convey meaning, these burgeoning theoretcial fields have had a special impact on the analysis of fil and literature. In this provocative book Kaja Silverman undertakes a new and challenging reading of recent semiotic and structuralist theory, arguing that films, novels, and poems cannot be studied in isolation from their viewers and readers.

Identifier: 9780195031782

Status: Available

Other title information: Studies in the Development of Signifcance

Notes: Reprint of the edition London, 1903, with an Introductory essay by Gerrit Mannoury and a Preface by Achim Eschach.

Annotation: In "What is Meaning" (1903) the author elaborates on the fundamental tenets of her theory of sign, to which she gave the overall term significs . One of the main obstacles to an adequate theory of meaning, in Lady Welby s opinion, is the unfounded assumption of fixed sign meaning. "There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the Sense of a word, but only the sense in which it is used the circumstances, state of mind, reference, universe of discourse belonging to it. The Meaning of a word is the intent which it is desired to convey the intention of the user. The Significance is always manifold, and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing its importance, its appeal to us, its moment for us, its emotional force, its ideal value, its moral aspect, its universal or at least social range." This facsimile of the 1903 edition of "What is Meaning" is accompanied by an essay on "Significs as a Fundamental Science" by Achim Eschbach, and "A Concise History of Significs" by G. Mannoury.

Identifier: 9027232725

Status: Available

Annotation: The symbolic meaning imposes itself on me by a double determination: it is intentional (this is what the author meant) and it is taken from a sort of general, common lexicon of symbols: it is a meaning that goes to meet me. I propose to call this complete sign the obvious meaning. As for the other meaning, the third, the one that comes 'in excess', like a supplement that my intellect cannot quite absorb, at once stubborn and fleeting, smooth and eluding, I propose to call it 'the obtuse meaning.' --Roland Barthes

Identifier: 2020146096

Status: Available

Status: Available

Other title information: Symposium de Varsovie 1968

Annotation: A compilation of papers covering different topics through a semiotic approach, including literature, linguistics, psychology and zoosemiotics

Status: Available

Annotation: More elaborately and self-consciously than anywhere in the West, Russian criticism has developed three major schools. One of these looks for the essence of literature in its philosophical and religious ideas: writers like Berdjaev, mainly interested in an interpretation of Dostoevskij, see literature as a way of knowing the absolute. A second school is the social: literature is not only a mirror of society but an incitement to social thought and action. In its Marxist version, social criticism has become the official Soviet creed and is thus felt today as peculiarly representative of Russian criticism. But a third school, that of Formalism, is so far much less known and much less accessible in the West. It arose around 1914 and was suppressed around 1930. Russian Formalism keeps the work of art itself in the center of attention: it sharply emphasizes the difference between literature and life, it rejects the usual biographical, psychological, and sociological explanations of literature.

Identifier: 9027904502

Status: Available