Semiotics In The United States And Beyond

"As a glimpse onto U.S. American semiotics through the mind's eye of a witness, participant-observer, architect, and midwife, this slim but rich book fulfills its title." --Journal of Linguistic Anthropology "This book is an invaluable historical, conceptual, and anecdotal account of the rise of semiotics in the United States." --Review of Metaphysics Sebeok, who has done more to establish the field of semiotics in the United States than any other single scholar, here draws upon his personal experiences of half a century to present the achievement and current status of semiotics in this country. He focuses on salient individuals and intellectual issues, including theatre, television, folklore, sociology, tourism, and graphic design. He also examines semiotic applications to architecture, marketing and advertising, jurisprudence, and medicine.

A theory of human origins that is one-half Charles Darwin and one-half Cain and Abel is bound to entail a lot of rethinking of traditional themes. Rene Girard's thesis of original human violence and the Bible's power to reveal it has been around for more than a generation, but its consequences for Christian theology are still only slowly being unpacked. Anthony Bartlett's book makes a signal contribution, representing an astonishing leap forward in understanding what a biblical disclosure of founding violence means for Christian thought and life. If human language arose directly out of the primal experience of murder, then semiotics becomes a core area for theological examination. Tracing the discipline of semiotics through postmodern thinkers, then back through its birth in the Latin era, Bartlett shows how Girard's thought is itself a semiotic emergence, beyond standard Christian metaphysics. Above all, Girardian theory of human signs demands we see the generative impact of violence in our language and thought, and then, conversely, that the Word of God, crucified without retaliation and risen in the same identity, brings a totally new sign and relation into history, offering a thoroughgoing transformation of human life and meaning.

Critical Semiotics provides long overdue answers to questions at the junction of information, meaning and 'affect'. The affective turn in cultural studies has received much attention: a focus on the pre-individual bodily forces, linked to automatic responses, which augment or diminish the body's capacity to act or engage with others. In a world dominated by information, how do things that seem to have diminished meaning or even no meaning still have so much power to affect us, or to carry on our ability to affect the world? Linguistics and semiotics have been accused of being adrift from the affective turn and not accounting for these visceral forces beneath or generally other from conscious knowing. In this book, Gary Genosko delivers a detailed refutation, with analyses of specific contributions to critical semiotic approaches to meaning and signification. People want to understand how other people are moved and to understand embodied social actions, feelings and passions at the same time as understanding how this takes place. Semiotics must make the affective turn.

"As a glimpse onto U.S. American semiotics through the mind's eye of a witness, participant-observer, architect, and midwife, this slim but rich book fulfills its title." -- Journal of Linguistic Anthropology "This book is an invaluable historical, conceptual, and anecdotal account of the rise of semiotics in the United States." -- Review of Metaphysics Sebeok, who has done more to establish the field of semiotics in the United States than any other single scholar, here draws upon his personal experiences of half a century to present the achievement and current status of semiotics in this country. He focuses on salient individuals and intellectual issues, including theatre, television, folklore, sociology, tourism, and graphic design. He also examines semiotic applications to architecture, marketing and advertising, jurisprudence, and medicine.

This volume discusses the major founding scholars of «semiotics of culture», including Charles Sanders Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Jurij Lotman, and Mikhail Bakhtin who established dialogue as the basis of all human communication.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Conducting an analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, this book links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of 'progressive' cognition and child cognitive development.