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The article discusses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics with selected concepts of biosemiotics is discussed. The following part of the paper is dedicated to Bruno Latour’s ideas on nature–culture relation, hybrids and mediations. Then the author refers to Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere as the common space for all living and inanimate elements. Closing the paper with a return to biosemiotics, the author comes back to Tarasti’s ideas and compares these with some ideas in biosemiotics, paying special attention to the concepts of unpredictability, choice and dynamics. The comparison shows that some intuitions, assumptions and theses of these different scholars turn out to be surprisingly convergent. The author believes that the outlined parallels between Tarasti’s view, Latour’s and Lotman’s concepts, and biosemiotics may be promising for further research, inviting detailed study.
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The study focuses on the repeated visits of Russian-born Harvard linguist Roman Jakobson to Slovakia. The author traces Jakobson’s Slovak contacts from the interwar period up to 1968. Based on analysis of secret police documents and memoir literature, the research offers an insight into contemporary academic and cultural life in 20th century Czechoslovakia.Jakobson’s first Slovak contacts in the 1920s were linked to his activities in the Prague Soviet legation and the Charles University. In the 1930s he visited Bratislava more frequently, while teaching at Brno University. During the Stalinist era in Czechoslovakia, a number of his friends and colleagues were politically prosecuted. Only in 1957, was he able to return to Czechoslovakia for Slavonic Studies conferences in Prague and Olomouc, using this occasion to give a lecture also in Bratislava. In the approaching wave of hate-campaign against local “unreliable intellectuals” he was denounced as a “cosmopolitan” and “Western agent”. Subsequent attempts for Jakobson’s academic and public rehabilitation, urged by his Czechoslovak friends, became a reality only during his visit in 1968. The presentation ceremony of the Golden medal of the Slovak Academy of Sciences to Roman Jakobson was scheduled in Bratislava on August 21, 1968, the day of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact.
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The research on gregorian chant from the middle of the 19th century had their protagonists mainly in some of the Solesmes monks, but not without polemics. After the St. Pius X motu roprio, and the new Vatican edition, the Solesmes style and Methode… was spread everywhere, but some voices, from the own monastery, claimed for a new approach to the musical writing: the neumes. Dom Cardine’s Semiology was the science created to answer some of the the lacks of the Mocquereau’s theories. In this paper I’ll try to show a little history of the previous works to the Cardine’s Semiology, specially the Cardine’s own works developed from the previous researches of the Paléographie musicale.
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Since the existence of mankind’s fears, helplessness, despair, loneliness has led to various superstitions. Superstitions continue their adventures even from modern times to the present day by being fed by the helplessness of human beings against nature. Outside human nature, society; heretic culture, pagan beliefs, folklore, tradition / tradition, rituals, mythology; Christianity, which is influenced by male hegemony, the dominant power in the Middle Ages, the Puritan consciousness and superstitions. While various superstitions such as black cat, evil eye and ladder reach universal dimensions, human psychology and historical events can be given as examples of the factors shaping superstitions. Psychology and psychiatry, as well as the historical origins of superstitions, have been guiding in explaining these beliefs; it will be the art that makes superstitious beliefs easier to grasp, making them immortal images. Visual arts, such as painting and cinema, are among the most important artistic productions directed towards symbolic, metaphoric expressions. This study examines the relationship between visual arts such as cinema and painting and phenomena such as rituals, mythology and superstitions. In particular, superstitions in horror cinema will be researched.
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When the social dynamics of pre-revolution and post-revolution era are examined, the existence of transition process is remarkable and it is seen that there is an uncertainty. In the ongoing process, this situation is reflected in the cinema, it is understood that “male gaze” and the efforts of patriarchal ideology to shape the cinema have a negative effect the representation of woman. Pre-revolution era, in the process of representation, the woman who put up a good fight against to exhibitionism, at postrevolution era was forced to veil oneself by the effects of Islamization movement, and thus the cinematic representation is adversely affected. In Bahram Beizai’s cinema, a oppostional reading is developed for the mainstream female myth that patriarchal ideology deals with in both periods, and this form of reading becomes continuous both pre-revolution and post-revolution era. In order to makes the claim, Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, Gharibeye Koochak (Bashu, Little Stranger - 1989) movie is taken as a sample and cinematographic analysis method is adopted through feminist literature. In this context, the counter-myths created by Beizai are embodied by the sequences supporting the narrative and the theoretical background of feminist critical discourse analysis is utilized in the process.
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The book explores narratives of black: brings black into different contexts, compares it with white and other colours of spectrum, reflects on the underneath meanings hidden by black. It is a piece of art that is difficult to be classified by genre: it may be a collection of short stories, an autobiography, an essay. Belonging to both literary and philosophic contexts, this book is not “heavy”, both literally and metaphorically, but filled with unusual observations and reflections on meanings hidden behind the colours.
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The problem of relevance, at individual agent scale – or how we decide what is adequate for our interpretation of the signs we encounter in the world – is a question that keeps reappearing in semiotics and other disciplines concerned with meaning. In this article I propose an approximation on relevance that conceives meaning as a trajectory across a cognitive landscape. Unlike conventional accounts on relevance, which presuppose mental processes built on feature-based representations, my proposal suggests conceiving cognition as a fluid and emergent field of attractors basins that become specified and modified when experiences appear, and conceiving meaning as a trajectory across the cognitive field. Consequently, I suggest that when cognitive landscapes better fit world experience, agents’ categorizations will be more relevant. My proposal is mainly supported by two approaches: the enactivist notion of structural coupling and the theories of dynamic neural populations of Walter Freeman III.
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Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication, a journal from the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University and founded by Prof. Kristian Bankov, explores the new forms of knowledge, social and linguistic interaction, and cultural phenomena generated by the advent of the Internet.
The purpose of the journal is to provide a collaborative work field for scholars interested in researching new phenomena in the dynamic digital world. Our main purpose is to build a scientific bridge between the fields of semiotics, communications, social sciences and the problems of the digital era.
We believe that our collaborations can raise the level of understanding for modern digital phenomena, providing both a solid theoretical framework and profound applied research.
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The article offers the definition of discursive practice as a sign construct of the cognitive-semiotic, discursive-pragmatic and linguacultural levels, realised in the corresponding discursive situations, within which a semiotic configuration of elements of both one discursive practice and their combination occurs. In a cognitive-semiotic perspective, a discursive space is formed by the symbiosis of discursive practices as signs of a person’s communicative consciousness, i.e. a representative of a particular national-cultural community. In this aspect, the discourse is associated with the consciousness, knowledge and perceptions of the language personality, which are formed in the process of socialisation and become the basis of the cultural array, broadcast from generation to generation within a certain ethnic group. Thus, sign constructs of communicative consciousness are formed as concrete semiotic units embodied in discursive practices.
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Fictional names have specific, cognitively relevant features, putting them in a category apart from the category of ordinary names. I argue that we should focus on the name or name form itself and refrain from looking for an assignment procedure and an assigned referent. I also argue that we should reject the idea that sentences containing fictional names express singular propositions. These suggestions have important consequences for the intuition that ‘Sherlock Holmes exists’ is either true or false, and they put our intuitions concerning fictional names into perspective. If Millianism is the view that names only have a referent only as their semantic value, then my proposal on fictional names is not Millian in nature.
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Niniejsza książka ma formułować propozycję metodologicznego otwarcia groznawstwa,silnie akcentując rolę dyskursu i narracji już w dwóch tekstach otwierających:„Dyskursywne gry i dyskursy gier” Geralda Voorheesa oraz „Poza mitem i metaforą.Przypadek narracji w mediach cyfrowych” Marie-Laure Ryan. Podkreślenie roli narracjii dyskursu umożliwiło również umocowanie pozostałych rozdziałów książki w dwuwzajemnie się dopełniających paradygmatach: teorii i filozofii (w części zatytułowanej„Teorie”) oraz praktyce hermeneutycznej (w części zatytułowanej „Praktyki”), dostarczającychwspólnie narzędzi do krytycznej wiwisekcji uobecniających się w grachpostaw dyskursywnych oraz narracji o świecie, kulturze, religii, filozofii, teologii, ekonomii,płciowości, rasie czy polityce. (...) Problem dyskursów gier wideo oraz dyskursóww grach wideo ujawnia zatem nie tyle bałagan, co niesłychaną produktywność ujęćbadawczych, nieograniczonych sztywnymi normami pojęć, kategorii czy narzędzi teoretycznych,które równolegle odnajdują w grach wydarzenia, znaczenia, języki, komunikaty,idee, ideologie, hierarchie i struktury władzy oraz wykluczenia. Sploty problemowew grach jako formach komunikacji, tekstach czy obiektach kulturowych skłoniłynas do zastosowania formuły liczby mnogiej w określeniu „dyskursy gier wideo” –tak, by unaocznić zarówno potrzebę pluralizacji perspektyw badawczych, jak i odpowiadającejjej różnorodności uobecniających się w grach narracji o świecie, zarównotym nas otaczającym, jak i tym przez gry wytwarzanym.
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Theory change is a slow, tortuous process. Problems associated with how we communicate ideas and how these ideas are received by our peers become catalysts for change in how we ourselves perceive and sanction what the discipline is capable of doing. Some parts of semiotics, and particularly biosemiotics, have come under critical scrutiny because of their heavy commitment to Peircean philosophy, but at the same time, the contributions of Peircean philosophy are almost impossible to discount. The ripples of this situation are quite visible in the emergence of code biology as a post-semiotic research programme. Yet there is a general balance between those who do not put that much stock in Peircean concepts and those who cannot conceive semiotics without these. This paper will ask whether a biosemiotics after Peirce is possible at all in the sense of acknowledging Peirce’s contributions to the field while also taking to heart the criticisms raised by those skeptical of the implications of Peircean semiotics. While the answer is most likely positive, it depends on what background our concept of meaning relies on and how it may bleed into the other areas of semiotics that biosemiotics may claim a stake on. Being able to discuss potential theoretical distinctions across semiotics while also allowing communication between the areas caught in this differentiation will be crucial for the health of the discipline as the gap between theories becomes more profound.
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