Showing papers on "Semiosphere published in 2004"

Between Dreams and Reality: The Message and the Image of Renaissance Humanism

Abstract: Contrary to the claims of some influential postmodern trends celebrating the burial of historical humanism, as something ‘old-fashioned’ and pedagogically orientated, in the present paper an effort will be made to show how Renaissance humanism can be interpreted as a ‘border culture’ par excellence, capable of accumulating ambiguities —a substantial premise for producing powerful ‘explosions’ and subsequent ‘leaps’ (in Yuri Lotman’s terms) to new and different qualities in culture, as well as in our ‘semiospheric’ existence. The repercussions of these ‘leaps’ have reached vitally the start of the 21st century. I intend to outline the image of humanism as it has emerged from the work of Erasmus, Thomas More, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderon, to show on its example the ‘intra-history’ of the historical process that has been called the ‘Enlightenment’. To a far greater extent than the noo-spherically inclined ‘extra-history’, the interior Enlightenment, with its deep roots in historical humanism, has provided openness to ‘border’ sensibility and new cultural syntheses in the semiosphere, including culture, with literary creation as its ideologically and philosophically burdened nucleus. In the latter part of my article, I will centre on exemplifying my theoretical conclusions by Thomas More’s Utopia and the plays of William Shakespeare.