Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1986"

The Kristeva reader

Abstract: Part 1: Linguistics, Semiotics, Textuality 1. The System and the Speaking Subject 2. Word, Dialogue and Novel 3. From Symbol to Sign 4. Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science 5. Revolution in Poetic Language Part 2: Women, Psychoanalysis, Politics 6. About Chinese Women 7. Stabat Mater 8. Women's Time 9. The True-Real 10. Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents 11. Why the United States? 12. A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident 13. Psychoanalysis and the Polis

The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language

Abstract: Translator's introduction Introduction Study 1/Between Rhetoric and Poetics: Aristotle 1. Rhetoric and Poetics 2. The intersection of the Poetics and the Rhetorics: 'Epiphora of the name' 3. An enigma: metaphor and simile (eikon) 4. The place of exis in rhetoric 5. The place of lexis in poetics Study 2/The decline of rhetoric: Tropology 1. The rhetorical 'model' of tropology Fontainer: the primacy of idea and of word 3. Trope and figure 4. Metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor 5. The family of metaphor 6. Forced metaphor and newly invented metaphorStudy 3/Metaphor and the semantics of Discourse 1. The debate between semantics and semiotics 2. Semantics and rhetoric of metaphor 3. Logical grammar and semantics 4. Literary criticism and semantics Study 4/Metaphor and the Semantics of the word 1. Monism of the sign and primacy of the word 2. Logic and linguistics of denomination 3. Metaphor as 'change of meaning' 4. Metaphor and the Saussurean postulates 5. Between sentence and word: the interplay of meaning Study 5/Metaphor and the new rhetoric 1. Deviation and rhetoric degree zone 2. The space of the figure 3. Deviation and reduction of deviation 4. The functioning of figures: 'semic' analysis Study 6/The work of resemblance 1. Substitution and resemblance 2. The 'iconic' moment of metaphor 3. The case against resemblance 5. Psycholinguistics of metaphor 6. Icon and image Study 7/Metaphor and reference 1. The postulates of reference 2. The case against reference 3. A generalized theory of denotation 4. Model and metaphor 5. Towards the concept of 'metaphorical truth' Study 8/Metaphor and Philosophical Discourse 1. Metaphor and the equivocalness of being: Aristotle 2. Metaphor and analogia entis: onto-theology 3. Meta-phor and meta-physics 4. The intersection of spheres of discourse 5. Ontological clarification of the postulate reference Appendix Notes Works cited Index of authors

Designs On Signs / Myth And Meaning In Maps

Abstract: Every map is at once a synthesis of signs and a sign in itself: an instrument of depiction – of objects, events, places – and an instrument of persuasion – about these, its makers and itself. Like any other sign, it is the product of codes: conventions that prescribe relations of content and expression in a given semiotic circumstance. The codes that underwrite the map are as numerous as its motives, and as thoroughly naturalized within the culture that generates and exploits them. Intrasignificant codes govern the formation of the cartographic icon, the deployment of visible language, and the scheme of their joint presentation. These operate across several levels of integration, activating a repertoire of representational conventions and syntactical procedures extending from the symbolic principles of individual marks to elaborate frameworks of cartographic discourse. Extrasignificant codes govern the appropriation of entire maps as sign vehicles for social and political expression – of values, goals, ae...

Ceremonial Dialogues in South America

Abstract: In native South America, ceremonial dialogue is a widespread and prominent, yet simultaneously enigmatic, form of ritualized language use. This paper examines the ceremonial dialogic complex through the interpretive lens of a semiotic hypothesis, namely, that ritualized dialogic form is a sign vehicle, a “model of and for” linguistic and more generally social solidarity. A comparative correlational study confirms this semiotic interpretation, showing that the ceremonial dialogue is used in situations of potential conflict—the maximally distant social relations within a given society. This paper also raises a broader theoretical issue concerning the role of metacommunicative devices in social action, suggesting that it is the “meta-signal” itself that enables actors to formulate an image of action—thereby regulating it—simultaneously as it occurs.

Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages

Abstract: "As one of the very few books that competently span the millennium of the Middle Ages as well as the spectrum of modem critical approaches, Vance's Mervelous Signals should stand as a monument and exemplar to fellow medievalists, as well as providing inspiration for years to come."--Envoi. "A highly valuable contribution to medieval literary studies in its individual readings as well as in its illumination of literary theory."--Style. "Often brilliant, and always stimulating."--Studies in the Age of Chaucer. The investigation of language, of how (and what and why) signifiers signify, is prominent in modern critical work, but the questions being asked are by no means new. In Mervelous Signals, Eugene Vance asserts that "there is scarcely a term, practice, or concept in contemporary theory that does not have some rich antecedent in medieval thought." He goes on to illustrate the complexity and depth of medieval speculations about language and literature. Vance's study of the link between the poetics and semiotics of the Middle Ages takes both a critical and a historical view as he brings today's insights to bear on the contemporary perspectives of such works as St. Augustine's Confessions, the Chanson de Roland, Chretien's Yvain, Aucassin and Nicolette, Spenser's The Faerie Queen, and certain aspects of the works of Dante and Chaucer and of French medieval theater. Eugene Vance, a professor of comparative literature at Emory Uni-versity, is the author of Reading the Song of Roland (1970) and From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrative in the Middle Ages (1986).

The Symbolic Element in History

Abstract: A funny thing happened to me on my way home from the semiotics seminar. As I rounded a corner on C floor of the library, I noticed an advertisement from the New York Times pasted on the door of a student's carrel: "Fiji $499." Primed by a discussion of Charles S. Peirce and the theory of signs, I immediately recognized it as -well, a sign. Its message was clear enough: you could fly to Fiji and back for $499. But its meaning was different. It was a joke, aimed at the university public by a student grinding away at a thesis in the middle of winter, and it seemed to say: "I want to get out of this place. Give me some air! Sun! Mehr Licht!" You could add many glosses. But to get the joke, you would have to know that carrels are cells where students work on theses, that theses require long spells of hard labor, and that winter in Princeton closes around the students like a damp shroud. In a word, you would have to know your way around the campus culture, no great feat if you live in the midst of it, but something that distinguishes the inmates of carrels from the civilian population gamboling about in sunshine and fresh air. To us, "Fiji $499" is funny. To you, it may seem sophomoric. To me, it raised a classic academic question: how do symbols work? The question had been worrying me in connection with some criticism of a book I had published in 1984, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes of French Cultural History. In the book I had tried to show why a ritual slaughter of cats was hilariously funny to a group of journeymen printers in Paris around 1730. By getting the joke, I had hoped to "get" a key element in artisanal culture and to understand the play of symbols in cultural history in general. My critics raised some questions, which clung to "Fiji $499" in my thoughts as I trudged home through the dark. I would like to discuss those questions, not as a rebuttal to the criticism, for I still think my argument stands, but as an informal way of wandering through some general problems concerning the historical interpretation of symbols, rituals, and texts. In a long review of The Great Cat Massacre, Roger Chartier argues that the book is flawed by a faulty notion of symbols. ' According to him, symbolism

On Learning to Write about Ideas.

Abstract: As students improve as writers, what changes in their writing can we detect? This question has long stimulated research on ways to measure growth in writing ability. As part of the effort to develop and refine useful measures, many studies have investigated the value of syntactic units of analysis, such as sentence length and clause length. Although these measures have often proven to be reliable indicators of syntactic differences between writers at different grade levels and between good and poor writers at one grade level, they do not always shed light on the kind of growth these writers achieve over time. 1 Unfortunately, few studies have explored the use of lexical units of analysis to measure growth in writing ability. Those studies that have done so have tended to look only at the number of different words a writer has used in a specific text, or at their frequency of occurrence in the English language, in order to determine how varied or how easy or difficult a vocabulary the writer has used.2 These studies have found that good writing displays greater diversity in vocabulary than does poor writing. Apparently, the use of a larger number of different words is one sign of growth in the ability to express complex meaning in writing. But it is not clear from these studies exactly what the use of larger numbers of different words reveals about growth in writing ability or how it contributes specifically to the quality of writing. Moreover, the measures used in these studies do not provide information on how words are used to create meaning in written texts; they tell us, instead, only what words are used to create meaning. As a result, we have a limited understanding of how students grow in their ability to construct meaning with written language. Recently, two different approaches have been proposed for examining how words are used to create meaning in written discourse. One approach examines the subject of each clause in a text in order to explore how meaning is con-

The Acquisition of Visual Spatial Script

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the writing errors of normal Chinese children and deaf Chinese children who have learned to use the Hong Kong sign language that has its own principles of word formation and syntax, independent of spoken Chinese. The normal children made a number of errors involving phonetic confusions that tended to be absent in the deaf children, thereby suggesting different mediators for the script. The deaf children made sign-based errors less frequently found in normal children. These sign-based errors may reflect the formation principles of the Hong Kong sign language and the structure of Chinese characters that allowed the opportunity for these errors to occur. The deaf children used principles of sign construction borrowed from the Hong Kong sign language and applied them to the written form of Chinese they were learning. This is possible because sign and script are both languages that utilize space in the creation of their formal units. Thus, the recall of written forms of language has a close relationship with the mediators of language.

Social myths in literary and political texts

Abstract: This article discusses the common ways in which the concept of myth is perceived and shows that the nature and structure of a myth are functions of the system in which it operates. In Mythologies, Barthes defines myth as a three-dimensional pattern (the signifier, the signified, the sign) built on a second-level semiological method. The element that was a "sign" in the first method is transformed here into a mere signifier by means of which the myth constructs a new system of its own. Barthes calls this system a "stolen language" because it turns the meaning of the first language into a mere form and lends it a new meaning which now appears as absolute and neutral. Barthes considers such a language typical of bourgeois society, enabling it to depict its situation and historical conditions as universal and ahistorical.

Sign, symbol, and metalanguage: against the integration of semiotics and symbolic interactionism

Abstract: Dean MacCannell's proposal for a “rapprochement” between symbolic interaction-ism and semiotics, in which the “generality” of symbolic interactionism's conception the sign is “raised” to that of semiotics, is examined. By turning exclusively to Saussurian semiotics, MacCannell does not adequately reflect the distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” representation in Peirce's semiosis that is the most fruitful link with Mead's symbolic interactionism. Consequently, MacCannell's argument at the level of terminology is flawed. Rather than merging, the perspectives might benefit from a radical rethinking of representation. This would involve preserving the distinction between the “natural” and “arbitrary,” while at the same time recognizing that in mass society “arbitrary” representation has become a kind of “second-order” (Barthes) indexical metalanguage of membership within which symbolic interaction may occur. As Baudrillard claims, “commutation of signs” has replaced “interaction of symbols,” yet strains against an unfulfilled symbolic demand. Efforts should be directed at generating a theory of representation capable of addressing the tension that produces this symbolic demand.

Keeping symbolic interaction safe from semiotics: a response to harman

Abstract: This article provides a critique of the particular way in which Lesley D. Harman has proposed to accommodate Symbolic Interaction to semiotic theory and method. Harman’s argument rests on a belief in the reality of the nature/culture dimension as prior to semiotic or sociological theory. According to Harman’s view, nature is the realm of determinism, culture is the realm of freedom, and social theory ought to align itself with freedom and culture. A semiotic alternative based on Peirce’s concept of the sign is suggested. The alternative socio-semiotic approach opens the possibility of studying both cultural determinism and creative processes in nature.

Language as a Tool

Abstract: Until now we have viewed the sign as something that represents something else. The relationship between the sign and what it stands for must now be made more specific. First we will follow Karl Buhler, who proposed in 1934 in his epoch-making book Language Theory an organon model of language or, more specifically, of the sign. It is called an organon according to the Platonic principle: language is a tool, an instrumental auxiliary, by means of which one person can communicate something about something to someone.

Basic Principles of a Psychological Analysis in the Theory of Activity

Abstract: The general psychological theory of activity created by L. S. Vygotsky, A. N. Leontev, A. R. Luria, and their disciples has entered a critical phase in its development. An external sign of the advent of this phase is the increased frequency of discussions of the role of the category of activity in building the conceptual apparatus of psychology. One hears ever more insistently the idea that the category of activity is threatening to become a kind of monster, ready to devour all other psychological concepts [4,14,37,45]A.n internal sign of the advent of this critical phase in the development of the theory of activity is the discrepancy between the tremendous amount of factual material accumulated in the various special areas of psychology in which the theory of activity plays a special role and the initial principles of this theory, formulated very early, when it was just being developed. As a result, a paradox has emerged: a theory engendered by the exigencies of practice is beginning to be perceived as a...

Syntactics. Its Relation To Morphology and Syntax, To Semantics and Pragmatics, and To Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics

Abstract: In recent decades, a number of text books and dictionaries of semiotics have been published which introduce the reader to the international language of sign theory (for a survey cf. Sebeok 1976 and the introduction to Sebeok 1985). In order to deal with the formal side of signs, most of these books use notions taken from linguistics, such as “syntax” and “morphology,” “syntagmatics” and “paradigmatics.” However, these notions are not general enough to cover the formal aspects of all kinds of signs, and therefore their uncritical use can lead to ambiguity and confusion.

Antonioni and Hitchcock: Two Strategies of Narrative Investment

Abstract: Photographs are dropped and pile up on a desk, as they are scrutinized. A voice-off asserts, "No, this isn't the usual story; no suspicions." So begins Cronaca di un amore, Michelangelo Antonioni's first feature film (Italy, 1950). Let's separate for a moment the aural from the visual components and address first the question of the voice-off. "No, this isn't the usual story": this statement which inaugurates the plot from the margins of the scene, this intervention at once justifying and accompanying the action, has the immediate effect of marking in the film the presence of a narrator-someone who is expected to "offer" a story, to situate it, and to justify it. This narrator, however, operates under the sign of a doubt; to be precise, under the sign of a double uncertainty. In fact, the sentence with which the narrator introduces himself could mean: "No, this isn't the usual job I'm asked to do"; the negation concerns the narrator's reasons for entering the scene and the responsibilities we expect are entrusted to someone like him who appropriates the word to guide the representation. In this sense, we are distancing ourselves from the narrator of the cinema as employed before Cronaca di un amore, that is, from the voice-off frequently and willingly introducing and punctuating neorealist films (to choose one among many examples, Paisd (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1946). This neorealist voice, a sort of radio voice, served the function of filtering and objectifying events and, therefore, of signalling an instance of both participation and witness: the voice that speaks is a "we"' a subject who had directly lived a collective event but who, at the same time, returned an official version of it. The sum of all the protagonists' versions, it is at once a memory and an archive. The reasons motivating this word "in the plural" are, therefore, clear: behind it, as its patron and guarantor, there was a virtual "social mandate": an

The Meaning of Duality of Patterning and its Importance in Language Evolution

Abstract: Developing ideas discussed in Pulleyblank 1983, I argue that duality of patterning characteristic of all human spoken languages differs crucially in kind and not merely in degree, or differs to such a degree as to amount to a difference in kind, from that which can be found in other sign systems, namely those that are not in some way derivative from spoken language, such as spontaneously developed systems of manual signs or non-phonetically based pictograms. Furthermore, the arbitrariness of the relationship between symbol and referent that is made possible by duality of patterning is what gives human language its unlimited potential as a tool for conceptualizing the world. This is not the whole story in the evolution of human mental capacities but it was probably this new potential more than anything else that was responsible for the exponential cultural growth that began in the Upper Palaeolithic.

Semiotics in Chile

Abstract: The first obstacle that arises when one attempts to present an overview of the development of semiotics anywhere has to do with the definition of the field. As a matter of fact, just about any research in social science can be considered semiotic or having a direct bearing on people’s creation and use of signs. This being so, and because this is not a theoretical paper but an informative one, we made an arbitrary decision and adopted the following criterion: An intellectual work or enterprise is semiotic when it approaches sign systems as such, that is to say, when there is an explicit awareness of having to do with systems of signification and an overt willingness to account for them in a systematic way. Along these lines, we have excluded those works that have a narrow professional relevance, even if they deal with a semiotic system.

Semiotics in the Low Countries

Abstract: Before embarking on a survey of semiotic activity in the Low Countries, I must impose some restrictions on its scope. An extensional restriction will be made to work published by 20th-century Belgian and Dutch scholars. This allows me to exclude the writings of “Netherlandic” speculative grammarians, such as Siger de Cortraco, who were active in the circle of modistae (more specifically, the later generations of this intellectual trend) at Paris,1 at a time when the geographical frontiers were different (and differently conceived) from the present ones. Also excluded are the dispersed remarks of pre-20th century theologians (e.g. Arnold Geulincx), and of theoretical linguists2 (e.g. Jacob van Ginneken, Antoine Gregoire), concerning the (linguistic) sign.

What is the Nature of Women's Oppression in Language?

Abstract: Today I want to examine the question of women's oppression in and through language. I want to argue that there are two sides to this: on one hand, the sort of critique of language familiar to us from the work of many feminists; and on the other, the use of linguistic methods of analysis to uncover and talk about oppression more generally. The original question put to this panel was: 'is gender implicated in the struggle for the sign?'. Let me therefore begin by saying that in my view, that question is somewhat misleadingly framed. If there is indeed a struggle for the sign — or, as I prefer to put it, a struggle for meaning — it is not propelled by its own linguistic momentum, but by wider social and political forces. Hence my insistence on a two-sided project, directed to oppression and not just to language. It is idle, I believe, to address questions of sexual difference in isolation from the issue of dominance, and my argument is constructed with that point in mind. The struggle for meaning which concerns me here, then, is a more or less conscious part of the political struggle against women's oppression. And in this feminist struggle gender is not merely implicated, it actually is the disputed territory. As part of our project, feminists must challenge the dominant meanings that surround key concepts like masculinity and femininity: and we must make alternative interpretations available, if radical transformation is ever to happen. It is in the nature of any radical

Semiotics in Belgium

Abstract: Semiology being a science which is still undergoing rapid evolution, for some it is characterized primarily by its object whereas for others it can be defined in terms of its methodology. So far, the uneven evolution of semiology has not brought it to the point at which it could assume its basic, let alone its final, form. The number of works which relate or could relate to this young discipline is presently growing in almost geometrical progression, thus testifying to a positive albeit somewhat disquieting dynamism. It would neither be feasible, therefore, nor even desirable at this juncture, to discuss everything which has been undertaken so far in Belgium and which is either distantly or closely related to the science of sign systems. In consequence, we shall deliberately limit ourselves simply to mentioning a number of works or articles which make a contribution to the semiotic project, rather than presenting them in detail.

Lukacs: Horizons and Implications of the "Typical Character"

Abstract: while Hegel's remains idealistic and politically arbitrary (a forced bet in Pascal's sense). The proble of Lukacs is in fact the problem of the enlightenment, dropped by the increasingly irrationalist bourgeoisie and picked up by the radical intelligentsia within the only rational horizons left-those of marxism. This is entirely compatible with romantic forcing (as we saw in the analysis of Stendhal). Thus, what for Bloch-and Brecht-became Marx's most important text, the Theses on Feuerbach with their critique of that philosopher's and Marx's own youthful, abstract humanism in the name of material practice, for Lukacs did not apply: he preferred Fichte's etaphysical ethics of "perfect sinfulness" and future salvation as the basis for a generically human historiosophy. This is forcefully affirmed throughout his work and brought to a head in the Aesthetics. Perhaps this section can be summarized in terms of what semioticians today call pragmatics, the domain of relationships between the signs and their interpreters. Sym etrically obverse to the structuralists, Luk~ics does not face up to its unavoidable complexity. Yet all materialist critics of culture should take it as their central task to understand and develop pragmatics-not simply as an independent discipline on a par with syntactics (the domain of relationships between the signs and their formally possible combinations) and with semantics (in this sense, the domain of relations between the signs and the entities they designate), but furthermore as a constitutive and indeed englobing complement of both semantics and syntactics. The basic and sufficient argument for pragmatics is that an object or event (word, text, shape, change) becomes a sign only in a signifying situation; it has no "natural" meaning outside of it. This situation is constituted by the relation between signs and their users; a user can take something to be a sign only as it is spatio-temporally concrete and localized, and as it relates to the user's disposition toward potential action; both the concrete localization and the user's disposition are always socio-historical. Furthermore, they postulate a reality centered not only on the signs but also on the subjects, in the double sense of psychophysical personality and of a socialized, collectively representative subject. Lukacs thought he could intervene with a philosophy of history directly into semantics (only rarely, in his best moments, does he get into some plot syntatics). Yet all words and propositions have a pragmatic value based on an implicit classification that follows the kind of interest which they evoke in the subject, the advantages or inconveniences, pleasures or sufferings, which they suggest (cf. a longer discussion and bibliography of pragmatics in Suvin, "People"). Thus, each and every semantic presupposition is also a prag atic one. The entry of permanently evaluating and potentially acting subjects reintroduces acceptance and choice, temporal genesis and mutation, and a possibility of dialectical negation into the frozen constraints of both syntax and teleology. Lukics recognized essentially one subject only: the march of a materialistically rebaptized World-Spirit through history-and the Critic (himself) as its prophet: a complete monotheism of the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:16:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Lukdcs: Horizons and Implications of the "Typical Character" 117 Islamic (or Judeo-Christian) fundamentalist stripe. He is a whole world-historical divide away from Brecht's, Bakhtin's or Barthes's great theme of the impossibility, in the final instance, to have critical monoglossia, a critical meta-language and system of positions and presuppositions fully independent of the criticized one. The sad price to pay for this was Lukics's impossibility-as that of any idealism or, to give it a historically suggestive name, medieval realism-to account for changes in our cognition of the world (never mind changes in an external reality). His perhaps worst deficiency is not what he analyzed, but what he failed to analyze properly or at all: Joyce, Brecht, Kafka, Beckett; Melville, Hardy, Twain, Faulkner... As he ruefully noted toward the end of his life, much of this (e.g., in the case of Cervantes and Shakespeare) is due to external circumstances. But not all. Narrative Agents and Typicality What are we to conclude about the narrative agents themselves, about the "typical character"? As for other aspects of criticism, I should hope that a properly developed theory of types would accept Lukacs's left-ethical passion, philosophical depth, and historical sweep, while rejecting his frequent right ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics resulting in instrumentalized oversimplification. The fact remains that after Biblical exegetes, and possibly after some Russian 19th-century critics, Lukacs pioneered the use of terms denoting typicality in literature. His approach was, again, symmetrically inverse to the formalist and structuralist one. As opposed to all the deniers of history-e.g., the later structuralists, who forgot that (to adapt their master) simply to understand the meaning of any term, it is necessary to permutate it in the context of all the discourses pertinent to it (Levi-Strauss, 162). Lukacs knew that "this typifying interpretation of behavior always presupposes and analyzes a certain state of the world in dialectical interaction with it" (K6peczi ed., 98). But he concentrated exclusively on a teleological, salvational (indeed soteriological) sociohistorical discourse, freezing out all other discourses. Thus, instead of falling into the structuralist trap of aping the conceptual rigor of linguistics, Lukacs manipulated an equally admirable and equally one-sided historiosophical rigor (salvation through aesthetics, or is it aesthetics as salvation?). We know that linguistics, when sundered from social verisimilitude and historical semantics, leads to "a rigorous irrelevance" (Culler, 257). Lukacs had more to offer as agential analysis: an understanding that types are social and historical, and that there is an intimate correspondence between the individual and the collective. Yet his understanding, very powerful but narrow, went astray and remained both a partial and a partially wrong understanding. Therefore, my argument has from the beginning been that corruptio optimi pressima (the corruption of the best thing produces the worst thing) and that salvational philosophy of history is necessary but not This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:16:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Stranger Within Young's Conjectures

Abstract: The publication in 1759 of Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison has been called "the event and date that most unmistakably signalize the shift in emphasis" from tradition and imitation to individuality and originality as poetic criteria.1 Even this large claim for the importance of the Conjectures sees the essay as a signal, a commemoration of a distance travelled in intellectual history. Indeed, Young's essay has caught the attention of critics more often as a sign of something other than itself than as a text whose internal structure provokes interest. But this work that marks a movement in critical attitudes toward genius is also a remarkable and idiosyncratic composition in its own right. The critical habit of viewing the Conjectures primarily as an indicator of something other than itself mirrors the structure of the essay itself, where Young rests the burden of an argument for self-reliance on the exemplary experience and insight of others. The work so often noted as heralding Romantic or modern notions of selfhood enacts, without explicitly acknowledging, problematical relations between self and others, and thus raises stubborn questions about the psychological implications of rhetorical strategies and the enduring tensions between literary theory and critical practice. Modern studies mention the Conjectures most frequently as a showcase for emerging ideas, a mileage-marker on the road from Neoclassicism to Romanticism; critics such as M. H. Abrams and Walter Jackson Bate have guaranteed the status of the Conjectures as a minor classic in this regard.2 Others-A. D. McKillop and

Duras's India

Abstract: For the sake of clarity, this title has been substituted for the initial one which was "Can she destroy India?", a play on two of Marguerite Duras's titles: a novel, Destroy, she says, and a film India Song. The intention then was to emphasize the radicalism of Duras's style and the essentially literary and poetic material to which this radicalism applies, the destruction being that of conventional narrative forms, which is what Duras has attempted in her writings and in her films. Since she has often expressed her ideas on filmmaking,1 she has provided general directions for the analysis of her work. In the particular case of India Song, her most successful film to date, the analytical work has been detailed and enlightening.2 The central and recurrent point in Duras's statements on film and in the analytical commentaries of her work is that her films ae to be liberated from mimetic representation. They are never the illustration of a text, the "mise en images" of a story or an attempt to duplicate life. In fact, she said of India Song that it is "la mise en echec de toute reconstitution."3 This brilliant formula points to the strong intention to work against the usual realistic conventions of making and viewing films. In order to resist the natural tendency of cinema to represent reality. Duras has elaborated a style of film writing which prevents the spectator from using conventional narrative codes. In India Song, the dissociation of images and soundtrack and the creation of a spatial system of endless reflections never originating in any outside reality thwarts the spectator's desire to know and to believe, to reconcile sign and meaning. The most efficient device used here by Duras is the deliberate absence of snychronization between voices off-screen which speak in passionate terms and protagonists on the screen who remain tight-lipped. The people seen never speak, while the voices are never embodied. The effect of deactualization thus achieved is reinforced by the general atmosphere of dusty abandonment in which the protagonists are shown. The re-enactment of the aborted love affair between Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice-Consul is only that, meaning only a re-enactment, given as such, in stilted and slow performances. Seyrig, the actress, lends her mystery to the idea that Stretter, the protagonist, cannot be represented and that what we see there is the impossibility of being AnneMarie Stretter. Clearly visible photographs of a woman who does not look at all like the actress emphasize the unbreachable gap between present and past, story and life. The other process which successfully defeats the spectator's desire to believe is the intricate spatial pattern of reflections created by the use of mirror shots that reverse all images in a constant flux of reflections without any stable base. Of course, these obstacles put in the way of the spectator's desire for representation should not be construed as flaws. The spectator of an "avant-garde'' film, such as India Song, expects to see more than an illustrated story. Therefore the unusual structure of the film satisfies the desire for sophistication, for "non-naivete," as Christian Metz calls it, on which the public success of such creations is based. Whether or not the film's structure is well understood is not that important since part of the pleasure derived from the film is given by its resistance to immediate and total intelligibility. Opacity, non-representation, destruction of "naive" expectations are rules of the genre; and in the context of the "avant-garde" genre, Duras's work may be less a radical departure from all conventional filmmaking than an adherence to and knowledge of the requirements of the avant-garde genre. It could be said that duras practices the rules of that genre as well as Hitchcock knew and practiced those of suspense. In both cases it is not a question of manipulating the spectator, but of playing with expectations within a tacit basic agreement on what the film is. …

Semiotics in Japan

Abstract: The word sign is usually translated into Japanese as kigō. The word kigō, however, originated in Chinese and was introduced into Japanese a long time ago. We call such Sino-Japanese words kango, whereas native Japanese words are called wago. In wago, kigō is shirushi. Shirushi is usually translated as mark in English.

Semiotics and International Scholarship: Towards a Language of Theory

Abstract: Tradition, Speculation and Cognition: A Prospective Investigation of Semiotic Terminology.- Syntactics: Its Relation to Morphology and Syntax, to Semantics and Pragmatics, and to Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics.- La Semiotique Peircienne Comme Metalangage: Elements Theoriques et Esquisse D'une Application.- Charles Sanders Peirce Ou L'Initiation a la Semiotique Theorique.- Ontogenesis of Iconicity and the Accessibility of the Mental Image by Children's Drawings.- The Place of Semiotics in the Study of Literature.- Music as Sign and Process.- Semiotique et Societe: Approche Du Spectaculaire.- Cross-Cultural Interaction: A Semiotic Perspective.- Meta-Anthropology: Semiotics In and Out of Culture.

The Hermeneutics of Rhetoric in Heidegger

Abstract: The distinction between what can be perceived by the senses and what cannot, made by Piato and represented in various forais throughout the history of human thought, constitutes the overall structure of traditional metaphysics. For this reason a study of rhetorical language in Heidegger cannot ignore the role of the transcendent power of the word, of its being a sign of "otherness" and of its constant interrelationship with metaphysics. By stressing the intimate link between language and Being, what Heidegger wishes to underline are the differing perceptions of reality that, in existence, in encounters between human beings, hâve to be expressed through the medium of metaphors, thus creating the different linguistic expressions intended to persuade and convince, communicate and designate, by means of precise connotation or the beauty of poetry. At first sight the composition of language, in its use and in its perception, would seem to point us in the direction of tracing the linguistic signs and references of the history of Being. Man should look out for both the historical topics of language and the creation of the figures of speech best suited to describe reality, throwing light on ail its aspects. However, in Heidegger such an undertaking seems doomed to failure: there is no consideration of the origins of language, no inventory complete or partial of figurative language to indicate what the essence of language is. The way backwards, from historical figures of speech to the locus of the essence, has a starting point but no finishing point and no route to relate those two points. Thus what we are looking for is, at the beginning, completely unknown and we hâve no hope of being able to arrive at a locus which, the more we try to pin it down, the more it retreats from us and which expresses itself to each individuai in a different way. AH each of us can do is to

Naming the Rose: Readers and Codes in Umberto Eco's Novel

Abstract: Umberto Eco's theory of semiotics has taken an evolutionary path of development. A Theory of Semiotics, the first English edition of Eco's semiotics theory, was a detailed explanation of his theory of signs.1 The major criticism of this work, a lack of references to specific literary texts to elucidate the theory, led to The Role of the Reader.2 This book repeated the theoretical basis of the first book, but it also included a major section of specific literary texts such as Sue's Les mysteres de Paris and Allais's Un drame bien parisien. Eco reaches the most recent stage of his theoretical work with The Name of the Rose, a novel which was published in Italy in 1980 and translated into English in 1983.3 In this novel, as one critic suggests, Eco has moved from semiotic theory to "semiotic fiction."4 As Eco himself says in the closing line of his introduction to The Role of the Reader: "[a]fter having to let semiotics speak abundantly about texts, it is correct to let a text speak by itself about its semiotic strategy" (RR, 40). In "The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader" Eco explains the evolution of semiotics during the past twenty years.5 During the sixties, semiotics focused on the theoretical foundation of signs or sign-tradition. During the seventies, "there occurred a violent shift from signs to texts"; the emphasis in semiotic theory shifted from considering what constituted a sign to the formation of the text. The third stage (from the end of the seventies to the present) does not center on the "generation of texts but their reading." Eco believes that current semiotic theory is concerned with "the recognition of the reader's response as a possibility built into the textual strategy" (TS, 35). According to Eco, the reader "plays an active role in textual interpretation because signs are constructed according to an inferential model. . . ." Signs are the beginning of a process that leads a reader to an "infinite series of progressive consequences" (TS, 44) and are "open devices" that evoke meaning for the reader. This open quality of signs "postulates an active role on the part of their interpreter" (TS, 45). By defining this vital theory of signs as moving the reader to an infinite number of possibilities for interpreting a text, Eco argues that semiotics has moved beyond simply listing elaborate patterns for understanding signs and texts (a frequent criticism of semiotic theories) to the importance of the reader in understanding the signs found in the text. In The Role of the Reader Eco identifies the possible reader as the "Model Reader," who deals interpretatively with the codes within a text just as the author deals generatively with the codes. The Model Reader and author thus co

The sign in Klee

Abstract: In Klee's work the composite sign that constitutes the painting is presented in an ambiguous dimensionality that is made to interact with the verbal signs that label it, the title, in a dynamism or Bewegung to use one of his favourite terms.1 Such a possibility, of course, had been opened up through the programmatic complication of the painting itself by his contemporaries. And also, somewhat correspondingly, the signs within the painting are asked to work harder than simple icons or simple visual presences usually do. Klee evolved an elaborate theory of how lines in particular combination, points in particular combination, and colours in particular combination, could guide the eye of the viewer.2 These theories, surprisingly, are aimed also at explaining what happens through line, point, and colour to the spirit of the viewer, as of the painter. Now a certain discontinuity obtains between the visual and the spiritual in Das Bildnerische Denken, still more than in Kandinsky's treatise of a dozen ...