Showing papers on "Semiosphere published in 2000"
TL;DR: This essay, which functions as a prolegomenon to the entire rich collection, and which has the most ambitious theoretical reach of anything he wrote, distills decades of his research on a wide variety of topics in literary and cultural theory, semiotics, and Russian literature and culture.
Abstract: EN IURII LOTMAN, the leading figure of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, assembled his Selected Essays shortly before he died in 1993, he opened the first volume with "On the Semiosphere" ("O semiosfere," 1984).' This essay, which functions as a prolegomenon to the entire rich collection, and which has the most ambitious theoretical reach of anything he wrote, distills decades of his research on a wide variety of topics in literary and cultural theory, semiotics, and Russian literature and culture. It also makes several innovative moves to "naturalize" human culture by suggesting links and analogies to such scientific phenomena as biogeochemistry, the structure of the brain, and molecular symmetry. Lotman's aim is to propose a model of how culture works everywhere around the globe. The breadth, boldness, and eclecticism of Lotman's model are appealing. But closer scrutiny reveals that it needs to be refined or modified because a number of his central arguments appear to be flawed. In the first place, the link between biological and semiotic phenomena is undermined by fundamental differences between them. Second, despite the variety of issues over which Lotman casts his conceptual net, his understanding of culture and selfhood is predicated on a few basic assumptions. When these are considered from the perspective of the emerging discipline of cultural psychology, they reveal a specifically Western cultural
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