A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, book chapters, proceedings papers, conference abstracts and semiotic research materials.
A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, proceedings papers, collection articles and semiotic research materials. Search across the full database; results are shown with pagination.
Theory and Methodology of Semiotics
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- 1 edition
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Other title information: The Tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure
Annotation: The book is an in-depth presentation of the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has four parts: a historical introduction, the analysis of langue, narrative theory and communication theory. The book concerns the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It briefly reviews the historical schools of modern semiotics and then focuses on the Saussurean theory of the language system, the principles of narrative analysis as developed by A. J. Greimas, and the extension of this theoretical framework to the understanding of communication and the social nature of semiotic systems. It emphasizes the operational aspects of semiotics and matters of methodology and techniques, including the initiative of quantitative analysis.
Identifier: 9783110991581
Status: Available
Understanding and translating Confucian philosophy in the <i>Analect</i>s: a sociosemiotic perspective
In: Semiotica 2021, Issue 239
- Pages
- 287-306
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2017-0144
Structural Units of Mass Culture Mythology
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- 1 edition
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Other title information: A Cultural Semiotic Approach
Annotation: My dissertation focuses on the study of myths and their semiotic mechanisms that appear in contemporary mass culture texts. Although myths and mass culture as a whole have been widely discussed from the perspectives of various disciplines, there are no studies that deal with the systematization of mass culture mythology and the semiotic definition of mythic markers. The topic of this dissertation is interesting not only from a general theoretical, philosophical, anthropological and semiotic perspective, but also for practical reasons. I believe that I can convincingly show in my work that the study and identification of semiotic mechanisms of mass culture myths is applicable in the field of marketing semiotics and social communication. In my dissertation, I first compare mass culture mythology from a sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspective. This allows me to combine the two main epistemological approaches to myth research and treat myth as a holistic meta-concept on the one hand, and approach myth as a cultural text on the other. Based on the framework I have created, I will analyze various texts of mass culture in my work and focus on identifying the most common and enduring structural units of mass culture mythology. How do I define a smaller unit of myth? In defining it, I will rely on two structural principles of myth: the emic unit, which I denote by the concept of mythologeme, and the hybrid unit, which I denote by the concept of mytheme. In the course of the analysis, I will highlight the following mythologemes: Fate, Journey, Universality, Catastrophe, Golden Age and Mother Nature, and the mythemes: Transformation and Return. In addition to distinguishing the aforementioned mythologemes and mythemes, I will highlight their value and function in mythological discourse. Fate and Journey help to integrate the life of the individual into the whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature is associated with the existential need of a person to search for authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of the Universe, Catastrophe and Golden Age constitute the human time-spatial past-present-future triad. The latter are related to human questions about the origin of the world, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mythologeme of Transformation points to the idea of miracle and the mythologeme of Return to the time-spatial axis of the human semiosphere, to orderliness. The last chapter of the work applies the theoretical framework developed in the dissertation to specific case studies. The first of them is dedicated to the analysis of the TV political marketing of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader, and there I show how archetypal mythological meanings were included in the structure of the political narrative. The second case study focuses on the development of a specific brand, which I did in collaboration with the well-known Russian pop artist Manizha, and where I apply the mythologeme of Mother Nature.Further research into mythologemes and mythemes could open up new semiotic markers and thereby expand the field of application of semiotics, as well as help to better understand the mythological basis of culture. This dissertation presents a semiotic study of myth revealing in contemporary mass cultural texts and exploration of its inner semiotic machinery. Although a variety of studies have been devoted to myth, and quite a few studies have tackled mass culture issues, less attention has been given to the systematic articulation of mass cultural mythology and its markers, which reveal its inner semiotic machinery. Those issues are relevant not only from a general theoretical philosophical, anthropological, and semiotic point of view, but also have concrete applicability in marketing semiotics and social communications. Firstly, I discuss mass culture under an emancipatory umbrella approach and explore mass culture mythology from the sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspectives. Secondly, I combine two main epistemological attitudes of myth and integrate a holistic object of research – which appears as a meta-concept – from one side, and a text of culture – mass cultural narratives around brands conveying their main values – from the other side . Thirdly, I discuss the smallest units of mass culture mythology and explore its most widespread structural units. I classify the smallest units of myth by their structural principles: the emic units (mythologemes) and the hybrid ones (mythemes). There are the mythologemes of Fate, Course, Universe, Catastrophe, Golden Age, and Mother Nature, and the mythemes of Transformation and Backtracking considered in detail. The main existential values of those smallest mythological units are discussed. The mythologemes of Fate and Course help to understand individual life as a part of an integral whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature relates to the existential search for inner authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of Universe, Catastrophe, and Golden Age constitute an integral triadic idea about time and space (past-present-future) and reflect the human existential quest for an explanation of the world origin, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mytheme of Transformation represents the idea of mythological miracle, and the mytheme of Backtracking appeals to the idea of a mastered time and space. Fourthly, I extend the process to find more minimal units of myth in cultural texts of different genres. The first case is dedicated to close analysis of the television communication of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader. This case demonstrates the combination of archaic meanings and contemporary forms of myth within a narrative, producing new powerful connotations. The second case applies the Mother Nature mythologeme as a branding tool for building a coherent image of a musical artist. The further exploration of the mythologemes and mythemes and articulation of other semiotic markers of myth systematically enriches a profound understanding of human mind and culture.
Identifier: 9789949032150
Status: Available
Semiotics and its Masters
- Dependent title
- Volume 1
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Notes: Authors in the collection: Paul Cobley, Susan Petrilli, Augusto Ponzio, Youzheng Li, Marcel Danesi, Göran Sonesson, Gianfranco Marrone, Alexandros Ph. Logopoulos, Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, François Jost, José Luis Fernández, Patrizia Violi, Neyla Graciela Pardo Abril, Ugo Volli, Farouk Y. Seif, John Deely, Eero Tarasti, Dinda L. Gorlée, Isabella Pexxini, Anne Hénault
Annotation: This series focuses on the state of contemporary semiotics and its current applications. Each volume in the series places its topic within a general understanding of today's semiotics, an interdisciplinary field which investigates the application of sign theory not only to culture, but also to nature. The books are accessubly written and communicate with an academic readership that is not overspecialized.
Identifier: 9781501511752
Status: Available
Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics
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- 1 edition
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Annotation: This is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. The volume is mainly aimed at an audience outside biosemiotics and semiotics, in the humanities and social sciences principally, who will welcome elucidation of the possible benefits to their subject area from a relatively new field. The book is therefore devoted to illuminating the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an ‘epistemological break’ with ‘modern’ modes of conceptualizing culture. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations. The volume exposes the untenability of the ‘culture/nature’ division, presenting a challenge to the many approaches that can only produce an understanding of culture as a realm autonomous and divorced from nature.
Identifier: 9789402408577
Status: Available
Grand Hotel Abyss
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Other title information: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
Annotation: Who were the Frankfurt School — Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer — and why do they matter today? In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation.Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.
Identifier: 9781784785697
Status: Available
Meaning, Narrativity, and the Real
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- 1 edition
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Other title information: The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education IV
Annotation: This book examines the concept of meaning and our general understanding of reality in a legal and philosophical context. Starting from the premise that meaning is a matter of linguistic and other forms of articulation, it considers the inherent philosophical consequences. Part I presents Klages’, Derrida’s, Von Hofmannsthal’s and Wittgenstein’s explorations of silence as a source of articulation and meaning. Debates about 20th century psychologism gave the attitude concept a pivotal role; it illustrates the importance of the discovery that a word is globally qualified as ‘the basic unit of language’. This is mirrored in the fact that we understand reality as a matter of particles and thus interpret the real as a component of an all-embracing ‘particle story’. Each chapter of the book focuses on an aspect of legal semiotics related to the chapter’s theme: for instance on the meaning of a Judge’s ‘Saying for Law’, on law students training in varying attitudes or on the ties between law and language. Part II of the book illustrates our general understanding of reality as a matter of particles and partitioning, and examines texts that prove that particle thinking is basic for our meaning concept. It shows that physics, quantum theory, holism, and modern brain research focusing on human linguistic capabilities, confirm their ties to the particle story. In contrast, the book concludes that partitions and particles are neither a fact in the history of the cosmos nor a determinant of knowledge and the sciences, and that meaning is a process: a constellation rather than a fixation. This is manifest once one understands meaning as the result of continuously changing attitudes, which create our narratives on cosmos and creation. The book proposes a new key for meaning: a linguistic occurrence anchored in dimensions of human narrativity.
Identifier: 9783319281742
Status: Available
Gustav Shpet's deep semiotics: A science of understanding signs
In: Sign Systems Studies 2015, Volume 43, Issue 2/3
- Pages
- 235-248
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2015.43.2-3.06
Sociocultural crossings and borders
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Other title information: musical microhistories
Annotation: In the current global world the interaction between cultures penetrates into musical practices and discourses, radically affecting the sociocultural imagination and altering the established shapes of cultural territories. Yet the history of music demonstrates that the dynamics of cultural encounters and segregations has always been a key factor in the formation of individual and collective identities and in the understanding of other cultures. Cultural expansions and, conversely, the trajectories of displacement of cultural expression are to a varied extent affected by the political, economic, technological and other dimensions of dissemination of musical practices and traditions. In the modern age, the extramusical factors are of equal significance to textual (creation) and contextual (dissemination and reception) configurations of sociocultural interactions. The understanding of sociocultural interactions and borders plays an important role in the appropriation of the musical past and the revival of cultural memory.
Identifier: 9786098071290
Status: Available
Cross-cultural Dialogue on the Virtues
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- 1 edition
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Other title information: The Contribution of Fethullah Gülen
Annotation: This book explores the development of the influential worldwide Hizmet movement inspired by the Turkish scholar Fethullah Gülen, known for his moderate Islamic emphasis on peaceful relations among diverse people. It provides a detailed study of Gülen’s account of the virtues and argues that they provide the key to understanding this thinker and the movement he inspired, from its initial establishment of hospitality houses through the growth of worldwide schools, hospitals, media outlets, charitable associations and dialogue centers. The book analyzes the distinctive virtues that shaped the Hizmet movement’s ethos as well as continue to sustain its expansive energy, from the core virtues of tolerance, hospitality, compassion and charity to a host of related virtues, including wisdom, humility, mildness, patience, mercy, integrity and hope. It also examines the Islamic and Sufi roots of Gülen’s understanding of the virtues as well as presents a comparative study of Gülen’s account of the virtues in dialogue with prominent thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition and the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism.
Identifier: 9783319078328
Status: Available
Human Suffering and Quality of Life
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: Conceptualizing Stories and Statistics
Annotation: This briefs on human suffering adds to human understanding of suffering by contextualizing both stories and statistics on suffering, while showing that suffering adds a useful perspective to contemporary thought and research on quality of life, social well-being, and measures of societal progress. The scholarship on suffering is made more comprehensible in the book by using nine different conceptual frames that have been used for making sense of suffering. The primary focus of this work is with the last frame, the quality of life frame. Overall, this chapters show how the research on quality of life and well-being can be enhanced by embracing human suffering.
Identifier: 9789400776685
Status: Available
Mathematics as a Modeling System
- Edition
- 1 edition
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Other title information: a Semiotic Approach
Notes: Editors of the series: Kalevi Kull, Silvi Salupere, Peeter Torop
Annotation: Mathematics and semiotics share many intellectual features and interests, from the study of how representations stand for specific kinds of referents to philosophical considerations of how these interrelate with reality. Nonetheless, in-depth studies of this intrinsic relation between the two have rarely been undertaken, with a few notable exceptions (as will be discussed in the book). Especially relevant to the study of the nature of mathematics is the concept of model – a term and notion that is used widely in both disciplines. However, to the best of our knowledge the theory of models in semiotics, known as Modeling Systems Theory, has rarely, if ever, been applied to the study of mathematical modeling. The purpose of this book is to do exactly that since it is our view that mathematics is a de facto modelling system in the semiotic sense and it is our hope that from this it will be possible to gain considerable insights into how mathematics works and achieves the discoveries and forms of knowledge that it has since the dawn of antiquity. Hopefully, this will allow both mathematicians and semioticians to pursue similar or analogous research objectives with regard to understanding the biological and cognitive etiology of sign systems and their connection to reality.
Identifier: 9789949326105
Status: Available
The Shared Mind
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Other title information: Perspectives on intersubjectivity
Annotation: The cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed social cognition through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of understanding Other Minds. The Shared Mind challenges the conventional theory of mind approach, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally based on intersubjectivity: the sharing of affective, conative, intentional and cognitive states and processes between a plurality of subjects. The socially shared, intersubjective foundation of the human mind is manifest in the structure of early interaction and communication, imitation, gestural communication and the normative and argumentative nature of language. In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and evolution, and language and linguistic theory.
Identifier: 9789027239068
Status: Available
Symbol i Muzyka
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Annotation: This book is an entry into the symbolicism of music. The book consists of three chapters. In the first, I deal with the concept of the symbol itself. I discuss its genesis, history changing understanding, and above all - it's functioning in contemporary thought in such fields as sociology, cultural anthropology, semiotics or semiology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and musicology. In the second chapter I present the problem of symbol and meaning in European music in a historical outline. The third chapter is my analysis of musical interpretations.
Identifier: 9788362743018
Status: Available
The space of culture
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Other title information: the place of nature in Estonia and beyond
Annotation: This volume sets out to construct a tentative bridge between the physical and perceived (academic) worlds, between the understandings of culture and nature, their spatiality and temporality by tackling the spatiality of culture phenomena across disciplinary boundaries. The contributions are arranged around a general question of how humans organise the spaces in which they live. The book is divided according to three themes: the humanities and ecosemiotic approach to nature, constructing nature, and examining environmental and landscape change. The first provides an historical review of the humanities and expands on the more theoretical themes. The second section discusses some ways in constructing (wild) nature with specific examples. The final one illustrates the changes that various cultures have brought about in the environment examining landscapes and domestication. The space of culture and the place of nature in various cultures are discussed critically throughout the volume in a way that challenges their ontological separations and invites to discuss culture-nature relationships on a more balanced basis
Identifier: 9789949196234
Status: Available
Understanding the city through its semiotic spatialities
In: Sign System Studies 2011, Volume 39, Issue 2/4: Tartu Semiotics
- Pages
- 124-144
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2011.39.2-4.05
Understanding Morphology
- Edition
- 2 edition
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Annotation: Understanding Morphology offers students an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a variety of languages.
Identifier: 9780340950012
Status: Available
Conditioning or cognition? Understanding interspecific communication as a way of improving animal training (a case study with elephants in Nepal)
In: Sign System Studies 2009, Volume 37, Issue 3/4: Zoosemiotics
- Pages
- 542-557
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2009.37.3-4.08
Comprensione e malinteso
- Dependent title
- Presentazione di Augusto Ponzio
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Other title information: Tra Babele e Pentecoste
Annotation: Comprensione e malinteso: non si tratta di una polarizzacione, di una copia oppositiva. Comprensione e malinteso vanno a braccetto e generalmente la comprensione e fatta di malinteso. Eliminare il malinteso significa spesso mettere in discussione una relazione, un consenso, un'adesione, un rapport di reciproca comprensione. Understanding and misunderstanding: it is not a polarization, an oppositional copy. Understanding and misunderstanding go hand in hand and generally understanding is made of misunderstanding. Eliminating misunderstanding often means questioning a relationship, a consensus, an adhesion, a rapport of mutual understanding. (Translated with Google Translate)
Identifier: 9788882314699
Status: Available
Varietas Et Concordia
- Dependent title
- Essays in Honour of Pekka Pesonen
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Annotation: Slavica Helsingiensia is published by the Department of Slavonic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at Helsinki University. The series was founded in 1983, and 31 volumes have appeared so far.... The volume is dedicated to Professor Pekka Pesonen on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It includes 38 articles, written by Professor Pesonen’s friends and colleagues – Finnish, Estonian, Russian and American scholars and also representatives of Professor Pesonen’s Finnish School. The topics covered by the articles range from general and theoretical questions concerning mainly Russian literature, culture and semiotics to specific and detailed analyses of Russian literary his-tory. The thematic variety (varietas) reflects Professor Pesonen’s keen interest in the study of literature and culture, the semiotics of Russian cultural history and the analysis of Texts (literary and cultural) within their social contexts. But his interests never have been bounded only by the pure scientific goals and Pekka Pesonen is widely known as a translator, literary critic, great ad-mirer of Russian culture and a part of it himself. The unity and agreement (concordia) of these different approaches is to be found in а search for understanding, – understanding literature, un-derstanding the specifics of Russian culture. Ultimately, it is а quest for understanding the emer-gence and the narration of Texts in history.
Identifier: 9789521038310
Status: Available
The Logos of the Bios 1
- Dependent title
- Contributions to the Foundation of a three-leveled Biosemiotics
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Annotation: This book opens a new perspective on living nature through the philosophical foundation of biology as an understanding social science. The contributions integrate the pragmatic turn of the theory of science discussion, replacing the solus ipse subject of knowledge of objectivism by the intersubjective - communicative character of thought, experience and research. A three-leveled biosemiotics investigates rule-governed sign-mediated interactions within and between organisms of all organismic kingdoms. This approach underlines the complementarity of syntactic, pragmatic and semantic rules as a precondition for adequately investigating the languagelike structure of the genetic code and the communicative organization of interacting living nature.
Identifier: 9525576019
Status: Available
Basics of Semiotics
- Edition
- 4 edition
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Parallel title: Parallel title: Semiootika alused
Annotation: Deely's objective is to distil common elements of semiosis from the whole continuum of animate reality (from the plant world to human beings) in order to set up a tagonomy of notions, principles and procedures for understanding the uniqueness of human semiosis.
Identifier: 9949110866
Status: Available
Readers of the book of life
- Dependent title
- contextualizing developmental evolutionary biology
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Annotation: The "chicken-and-egg" enigma of how genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a fascinating challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text and tuning the performance to the environment. Anton Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume that living beings are endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her or his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA." "This book should interest scholars in both biology and the humanities. To bring both kinds of reader to a common platform, the first part compares two problem-solving strategies: the "objectivist" approach common in natural sciences and hermeneutics as used in the humanities. The second part surveys aspects of the development of twentieth-century biology, also accentuating branches that never became part of today's mainstream. The third part reviews a large body of recent evidence, which can be interpreted in favor of the author's arguments."
Identifier: 0195149483
Status: Available
Understanding life: Trans-semiotic analogies
In: Sign System Studies 2002, Volume 30, Issue 1
- Pages
- 315-325
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2002.30.1.19
Mimicry: Towards a semiotic understanding of nature
In: Sign System Studies 2001, Volume 29, Issue 1: Semiotics of nature
- Pages
- 325-339
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2001.29.1.19
New science
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- 3 edition
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Other title information: Principles of the new science concerning the common nature of nations
Annotation: Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Identifier: 0140435697
Status: Available
S/E ≥ 1: A semiotic understanding of bioengineering
In: Sign System Studies 2001, Volume 29, Issue 1: Semiotics of nature
- Pages
- 277-291
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2001.29.1.16
The pursuit of signs
- Dependent title
- Semiotics, literature deconstruction
- Edition
- 2 edition
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Other title information: Augmented edition with a new preface
Annotation: The primary task of literary theory, Jonathan Culler asserts in the new edition of his classic in this field, is not to illuminate individual literary works but to explain the system of literary signification - the rules and conventions that determine a reader's understanding of a text and that make literary communication possible. In this wide-ranging book, he investigates the possibilities of a semiotics of literature.
Identifier: 0801487935
Status: Available
Intellectual Effort and Linguistic Work
- Dependent title
- Semiotic and Hermeneutic Aspects of the Philosophy of Bergson
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Annotation: Bergson discusses the questions of philosophic truth in a way that allows an interpretation in terms of contemporary semiotics and hermeneutics. In his famous "Philosophical intuition" he defines this kind of truth as "something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeded in saying it". This dialectic between intuition and its 'saying' is examined as the hermeneutics of understanding and interpretation. At the same time, this study attempts to open new insights in Bergson's philosophy, and especially in his notion of Intellectual Effort. Kristian Bankov, in his essay, considers this concept not only central to Bergson's philosophy, but also a key to the sign-nature of our whole being and existence in the world.
Identifier: 9519865403
Status: Available
The Perception of the Environment
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Other title information: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill
Annotation: In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers.
Identifier: 0415228328
Status: Available
A new causality for the understanding of the living
In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-01-04 00:00:00
- Pages
- 497-520
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.497
Sign, Thought, Culture
- Dependent title
- A basic course in semiotics
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Annotation: An introduction to semiotics, written in accessible language with references to everyday life so that the reader can develop an understanding of how signs work in the social world and communication.
Identifier: 1551301318
Status: Available
Collective misunderstandings due to misframings: The cases of Orson Welles (1938) and Philipp Jenninger (1988)
In: Synthesis in Diversity, Volume 2
- Pages
- 1131-1134
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Semiological Reduction
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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
Cultural Artifacts and the production of meaning
- Dependent title
- The Page, the Image, and the Body
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Annotation: Diverse essays addressing a variety of subjects, from Renaissance cartography to performance art to rap music, united in their common exploration of material criticism. This recognizes that materialist criticism may embrace techniques borrowed from psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxian, and historicist criticisms. It employs materialist criticism to broaden and strengthen our understanding of what constitutes a 'cultural artifact' and how such artifacts function.
Identifier: 0472082574
Status: Available
The semiotics of theater
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Notes: Originally published in three volumes as Semiotik des Theaters (1983)
Annotation: The theater is a particularly privileged semiotic object. Unlike literature or painting which operate within a single sign-system, theater combines a variety of sign-systems - language and gesture, costume and decoration, music and lighting - each of which generates meaning according to different principles. This complexity creates special challenges for understanding theater as a meaning-generating system. Erika Fischer-Lichte's book examines each of the sign-systems of the theater and investigates the ways they relate to one another. The result is a brilliant articulation of a semiotics of theater
Identifier: 0253322375
Status: Available
Understanding sign semiosis as cognition and as self-conscious process: A reconstruction of some basic conceptions in Peirce’s semiotics
In: Semiotica 1990, Issue 2024-01-02 00:00:00
- Pages
- 1-50
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1990.79.1-2.1
Why do vegetarian restaurants serve hamburgers? Toward an understanding of a cuisine
In: Semiotica 1990, Issue 2024-01-02 00:00:00
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1990.80.1-2.61
Semiotics, Self, and Society
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Annotation: These essays are concerned with the philosophical "category of person", viewed from anthropological and semiotic perspectives. In one sense the essays continue the Annee Sociologique tradition and the work of Marcel Mauss (1985 [1938]), whose classic study charted a comparative approach to the cultural construction of the self-concept. And in this same sense they continue also the work of Irving Hallowell (1955a,b) and his students (see Fogelson 1982), who have probed empirically the problem of how different cultures differentially encode understandings of what it means to be a self, with relative boundedness with respect to other-selves and with respect to the world of non-selves.
Identifier: 0899255604
Status: Available
Convention, Translation, and Understanding
- Dependent title
- Philosophical Problems in the Comparative Study of Culture
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Annotation: This book surveys theoretical controversies in anthropology that revolve around reconciling the objective description of culture with the influence of inquirer interests and conceptions. It relates them to the discussions by followers of W.V. Quine who see the problems of anthropological inquiry as indicative of conceptual problems in the basic assumptions operative in the discipline, and in the study of language in general. Feleppa offers a revised view of the nature and function of translation in anthropology that gives a plausible account of the problems that traditional semantics introduces into anthropology, while avoiding the severe methodological import Quine envisions.
Identifier: 0887066739
Status: Available