Interdisciplinary Approaches To Semiotics

This volume stresses the contemporary relevance of semiotics. The introductory chapter shows how the collection of papers emphasises crossings at the material level of physical reality as well as in their semio-cognitive and cultural implications, questioning the delimitation of interdisciplinary borders between the social sciences and humanities and STEM disciplines. The volume shows how semiotics continues to provide a framework for emerging knowledge traditions without completely disregarding its past. Through explorations in fields as wide apart as ecological psychology and visualisation systems, by finding correspondences between the arithmetic of music and cosmic energies or between the pedagogic significance of images and habitat facilities, as well as using investigation tools ranging from the mathematical representation of concepts to science education, this book addresses multifarious aspects and implications of culture and cognition, standing convincing proof that semiotics is as alive, productive and scholarly useful as ever.

“Semiotics Education Experience” is a collection of fifteen essays edited by Inna Semetsky that explores semiotic approaches to education: semiotics of teaching, learning, and curriculum; educational theory and philosophies of Dewey, Peirce, and Deleuze; education as political semiosis; logic and mathematics; visual signs; semiotics and complexity; semiotics and ethics of the self. This is a landmark collection of cross-disciplinary chapters by international scholars that mark out the appeal and significance of a semiotic approach to education. As Marcel Danesi reminds us in the Foreword, Vygotsky construed learning theory as the science of signs. Semetsky’'-s collection should be widely read by students and scholars in education, philosophy, futures studies, cultural studies, and related disciplines. It deserves the widest dissemination. Michael A Peters, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Editor, Educational Philosophy & Theory and Policy Futures in Education

This uniquely interdisciplinary collection of essays derives in part from a two-day international conference held at Heriot-Watt University in November 1999 and conceived as a critical forum for the discussion of the concept of interaction. The collection satisfies a continuing need for interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research in the humanities and stems from an awareness of the growing currency of interactionist theories in several fields and the need to make a critical contribution to such theories and related concepts such as intersubjectivity and dialogism. Rather than advancing an apologetic view of interaction as something given, the contributors carefully consider and challenge commonly held epistemological and theoretical assumptions relating to the interaction concept. Interaction, if it is to be a meaningful concept, must be seen in terms of its modes (e.g. linguistic, media-based), units (language, logic, communication), objectives (understanding, consensus, stability) and fields of operation (face-to-face interaction, translation, social codification). This collection is intended to offer a provisional response to the question posed by one of its contributors, ‘What does it mean today that communication as the mechanism of social co-ordination has itself become complex?’. It means that erstwhile certainties of meaning transmission, stability, duality or dichotomy, identity and difference can be challenged and theoretically modelled in new contexts. Interdisciplinarity is one means by which to illuminate this complexity from several sides in the pursuit of theoretical blind spots in the field of critical communication studies. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in communication theory, linguistics, translation studies, logic, social psychology, discourse studies, European Studies, philosophy and semiotics.

A study of the last drama of Aeschylus' trilogy concerned with the fortunes of the house of Laius that ends with the story of Oedipus' sons, the enemy brothers, who self-destruct in mutual fratricide but thereby save the besieged city of Thebes. The book's findings, however, far exceed these limits to explore the relationships between language and kinship, as between family and city, self and society, and Greek ideas about the nature of human development and identity.

The essays collected in this volume focus on the interrelated themes of mimesis, semiosis and power, each study exploring some facet of the problem of representation and its relation to strategies of power in the use of verbal and visual signs. Topics discussed include mimesis and power in Plato's Ion, rhetoric and erotics in Petrarch's thought; the limits of visual and verbal representation in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation; binary thought and Peirce's triadic semiotics; the cinematic semiotics of Gilles Deleuze; fascist iconography in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer; oppositional strategies in postmodern fiction; visual and verbal representations of the body in mass culture; and the semiotics of violence in postmodern popular culture.

This volume outlines a theory of translation, set within the framework of Peircean semiotics, which challenges the linguistic bias in translation studies by proposing a semiotic theory that accounts for all instances of translation, not only interlinguistic translation. In particular, the volume explores cases of translation which does not include language at all. The book begins by examining different conceptualizations of translation to highlight how linguistic bias in translation studies and semiotics has informed these fields and their development. The volume then outlines a complexity theory of translation based on semiotics which incorporates process philosophy, semiotics, and translation theory. It posits that translation is the complex systemic process underlying semiosis, the result of which produces semiotic forms. The book concludes by looking at the implications of this conceptualization of translation on social-cultural emergence theory through an interdisciplinary lens, integrating perspectives from semiotics, social semiotics, and development studies. Paving the way for scholars to analyze translational aspects of all semiotic phenomena, this volume is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in translation studies, semiotics, multimodal studies, cultural studies, and development studies.