Semiosphere

About: Semiosphere is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 219 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2698 citations.

"What Good Newes from Barbary?" Nascent Capitalism, North-Africans and the Construction of English Identity in Thomas Heywood's Drama

Abstract: During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries England experienced an epistemological transition that entailed the construction of a still precarious identity. This process involved the adoption of a new economy (nascent capitalism) and the shaping of a proto- racialist project of exclusion, which was mainly addressed towards the Muslim Other. In this paper I will show how a corpus of four plays by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Heywood problematizes this project by simultaneously reinforcing and interrogating it: I will suggest that whereas the new economy is apparently privileged and celebrated and Islam still appears to be approached without racialist assumptions, the plays develop some strategies that nostalgically question nascent capitalism and its consequences, as much as they start to display a process of racial stereotyping towards North-African Muslims. The four plays studied are Parts 1 and 2 of The Fair Maid of the West (ca. 1599-1603 and 1625-1630) and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (Parts 1 and 2) (ca. 1604 and ca. 1605). In order to explore these texts, and to define how the plays engage with these processes, I will employ Juri Lotman's cultural semiotic notion of the semiosphere.

The committee on public information : a transmedia war propaganda campaign

Abstract: This thesis develops an understanding of how propaganda entered the realm of journalism and popular culture in the United States during World War I through an examination of materials created by the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The CPI was a US governmental propaganda organisation created during World War I to persuade the nation to mobilise for war. Three of its divisions were chosen for this study: the Division of News (DoN), the Division of Four Minute Men (FMM) and the Division of Pictorial Publicity (DPP). Chapter 1 provides a general context for the thesis, outlines the research questions and details previous research on the CPI. Chapter 2 outlines the methods of analysis for interpreting the case study chapters and provides contextual information. The case studies are presented in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. These chapters are structured in the order of context, medium and content, and contain historical contextual information about each particular division, medialogical aspects of its propagated form and thematic groupings created from close reading of CPI materials. A semiotic analysis in the Peircian tradition is also performed on visual forms of propaganda in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 discusses how the expectations of persuasion, truth and amusement relate to each other when mediated in culture, using Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere. This further develops an understanding of propaganda as a cultural system in relation to other cultural systems – in this case, journalism and popular culture. Chapter 7 provides conclusions about the study, outlines relative strengths and weaknesses regarding the selection and deployment of methods, makes recommendations for future research, and summarises the key contributions of the thesis.

Ontology of information. Philosophical essays

Abstract: The information approach is practiced to study the Macrocosm (physical reality), biosphere, Microcosm (psychic reality), social reality, spiritual reality, and the technosphere. The ways in which scientists of different specialties understand information are characterized in detail. The interrelations between types of realities and types of information are revealed.

Lotman’s scientific investigatory boldness: The semiosphere as a critical theory of communication in culture

Abstract: The main focus of this article is the analysis of the concept of semiosphereas it has emerged from the conception of culture as information — instead of describing the transmission of messages from A to B, it is based on the general process of meaning generation. Following Lotman’s criticism on the paradoxes in communication and its theoretical domain, the article confronts the paradoxical concepts on: (1) the concept of message transmission from the addresser to addressee; (2) the notion of isolated processing systems; (3) the idea that culture speaks a unique language. From the standpoint of the semiosphere, the new object for studying such controversies could be found in the concept of text. When text is taken at the centre of the analysis of culture, nothing appears in an isolated fashion. Lotman’s thinking does not fear the new hypothesis in proposing the conceptual domain of semiosphere to the scientific study of culture.