Interdisciplinary Approaches To Semiotics

This volume stresses the contemporary relevance of semiotics. The introductory chapter shows how the collection of papers emphasises crossings at the material level of physical reality as well as in their semio-cognitive and cultural implications, questioning the delimitation of interdisciplinary borders between the social sciences and humanities and STEM disciplines. The volume shows how semiotics continues to provide a framework for emerging knowledge traditions without completely disregarding its past. Through explorations in fields as wide apart as ecological psychology and visualisation systems, by finding correspondences between the arithmetic of music and cosmic energies or between the pedagogic significance of images and habitat facilities, as well as using investigation tools ranging from the mathematical representation of concepts to science education, this book addresses multifarious aspects and implications of culture and cognition, standing convincing proof that semiotics is as alive, productive and scholarly useful as ever.

A study of the last drama of Aeschylus' trilogy concerned with the fortunes of the house of Laius that ends with the story of Oedipus' sons, the enemy brothers, who self-destruct in mutual fratricide but thereby save the besieged city of Thebes. The book's findings, however, far exceed these limits to explore the relationships between language and kinship, as between family and city, self and society, and Greek ideas about the nature of human development and identity.

This volume outlines a theory of translation, set within the framework of Peircean semiotics, which challenges the linguistic bias in translation studies by proposing a semiotic theory that accounts for all instances of translation, not only interlinguistic translation. In particular, the volume explores cases of translation which does not include language at all. The book begins by examining different conceptualizations of translation to highlight how linguistic bias in translation studies and semiotics has informed these fields and their development. The volume then outlines a complexity theory of translation based on semiotics which incorporates process philosophy, semiotics, and translation theory. It posits that translation is the complex systemic process underlying semiosis, the result of which produces semiotic forms. The book concludes by looking at the implications of this conceptualization of translation on social-cultural emergence theory through an interdisciplinary lens, integrating perspectives from semiotics, social semiotics, and development studies. Paving the way for scholars to analyze translational aspects of all semiotic phenomena, this volume is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in translation studies, semiotics, multimodal studies, cultural studies, and development studies.

The essays collected in this volume focus on the interrelated themes of mimesis, semiosis and power, each study exploring some facet of the problem of representation and its relation to strategies of power in the use of verbal and visual signs. Topics discussed include mimesis and power in Plato's Ion, rhetoric and erotics in Petrarch's thought; the limits of visual and verbal representation in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation; binary thought and Peirce's triadic semiotics; the cinematic semiotics of Gilles Deleuze; fascist iconography in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer; oppositional strategies in postmodern fiction; visual and verbal representations of the body in mass culture; and the semiotics of violence in postmodern popular culture.

Here is a radically interdisciplinary account of how Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs can be made to interact meaningfully with translation theory. In the separate chapters of this book on semiotranslation, the author shows that the various phenomena we commonly refer to as translation are different forms of genuine and degenerate semiosis. Also drawing on insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin (and drawing analogies between their work and Peirce's) it is argued that through the kaleidoscopic, evolutionary process of unlimited translation, signs deploy their meaning-potentialities. This enables the author to throw novel light upon Roman Jakobson's three kinds of translation - intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation. Gorlée's pioneering study will entice translation specialists, semioticians, and (language) philosophers into expanding their views upon translation and, hopefully, into cooperative research projects.

“Semiotics Education Experience” is a collection of fifteen essays edited by Inna Semetsky that explores semiotic approaches to education: semiotics of teaching, learning, and curriculum; educational theory and philosophies of Dewey, Peirce, and Deleuze; education as political semiosis; logic and mathematics; visual signs; semiotics and complexity; semiotics and ethics of the self. This is a landmark collection of cross-disciplinary chapters by international scholars that mark out the appeal and significance of a semiotic approach to education. As Marcel Danesi reminds us in the Foreword, Vygotsky construed learning theory as the science of signs. Semetsky’'-s collection should be widely read by students and scholars in education, philosophy, futures studies, cultural studies, and related disciplines. It deserves the widest dissemination. Michael A Peters, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Editor, Educational Philosophy & Theory and Policy Futures in Education

This book explores the interdisciplinarity of semiotics and communication studies, comprising both theoretical explorations and semiotic applications to communication with theoretical bearings. These disciplines have generally been understood as mutually implicit, but there still are many unexplored research avenues in this area, particularly on a conceptual level. The book offers broad insights into the epistemological relations between semiotics and other approaches to communication from perspectives such as sociology, philosophy of language and communication theory. As such, it sheds light on the communication of knowledge. Semiotics is currently enjoying increasing popularity within the humanities and social sciences. Understood as relational logic (Charles Peirce) or hermeneutics (structuralism and poststructuralism), semiotics fundamentally implies certain positions with regard to communication. Because of the generality and conceptual vagueness of semiosis and communication, how one elucidates the other is still an underexplored theme. With some pioneering studies of this relation, the books examines various fields, such as language, code, learning, embodiment, political communication, media, cinema, cuisine, multimodality and intertextuality.

This uniquely interdisciplinary collection of essays derives in part from a two-day international conference held at Heriot-Watt University in November 1999 and conceived as a critical forum for the discussion of the concept of interaction. The collection satisfies a continuing need for interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research in the humanities and stems from an awareness of the growing currency of interactionist theories in several fields and the need to make a critical contribution to such theories and related concepts such as intersubjectivity and dialogism. Rather than advancing an apologetic view of interaction as something given, the contributors carefully consider and challenge commonly held epistemological and theoretical assumptions relating to the interaction concept. Interaction, if it is to be a meaningful concept, must be seen in terms of its modes (e.g. linguistic, media-based), units (language, logic, communication), objectives (understanding, consensus, stability) and fields of operation (face-to-face interaction, translation, social codification). This collection is intended to offer a provisional response to the question posed by one of its contributors, ‘What does it mean today that communication as the mechanism of social co-ordination has itself become complex?’. It means that erstwhile certainties of meaning transmission, stability, duality or dichotomy, identity and difference can be challenged and theoretically modelled in new contexts. Interdisciplinarity is one means by which to illuminate this complexity from several sides in the pursuit of theoretical blind spots in the field of critical communication studies. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in communication theory, linguistics, translation studies, logic, social psychology, discourse studies, European Studies, philosophy and semiotics.

As a founder and leading figure in multimodality and social semiotics, Theo van Leuween has made significant contributions to a variety of research fields, including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, communication and media studies, education, and design. In celebration of his illustrious research career, this volume brings together a group of leading and emerging scholars in these fields to review, explore and advance two central research agendas set out by van Leeuwen: the categorisation of the meaning potential of various semiotic resources and the examination of their uses in different forms of communication, and the critical analysis of the interaction between semiotic forms, norms and technology in discursive practices. Through 11 cutting-edge research papers and an experimental visual essay, the book investigates a broad range of semiotic resources including touch, sound, image, texture, and discursive practices such as community currency, fitness regime, film scoring, and commodity upcycling. The book showcases how social semiotics and multimodality can provide insights into the burning issues of the day, such as global neoliberalism, terrorism, consumerism, and immigration.