Bøger i Semiotics, Communication and Cognition serien

Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema engages with very vital problems posed by Peirce's philosophy in an innovative and inter-disciplinary fashion by examining how documentary film practice can engage with the question of emergent human agency within a wider biosphere shared by human animals and non-human animals alike.The book is in many ways a celebration of human inquiry, taking liberally from Peirce's semeiotic and parallel ideas within recent visual anthropology. Through an analysis of the work of three renowned filmmakers - Jon Jost, Johan Van der Keuken, and Rithy Panh - Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema reasserts human agency within a global age, dominated by philosophical scepticism and an unquestioning subservience to mechanistic military techno-culture.The author argues that an approach to documentary inquiry, broadly derived from Peirce's sign theory, phenomenology, and overall philosophical outlook, has strong advantages over atemporal formal approaches derived from Saussurean semiology.Nevertheless, this project is also both critical and self-critical. It also bears direct testament to the many tumultuous and life-destroying events of the late 20th century and reminds us of the moral and philosophical problems which we are still grappling with in the early 21st century. Hence - the Living Sign.

Hitherto, there has been no book that attempted to sum up the breadth of Umberto Ecös work and it importance for the study of semiotics, communication and cognition. There have been anthologies and overviews of Ecös work within Eco Studies; sometimes, works in semiotics have used aspects of Ecös work. Yet, thus far, there has been no overview of the work of Eco in the breadth of semiotics. This volume is a contribution to both semiotics and Eco studies. The 40 scholars who participate in the volume come from a variety of disciplines but have all chosen to work with a favorite quotation from Eco that they find particularly illustrative of the issues that his work raises. Some of the scholars have worked exegetically placing the quotation within a tradition, others have determined the (epistemic) value of the quotation and offered a critique, while still others have seen the quotation as a starting point for conceptual developments within a field of application. However, each article within this volume points toward the relevance of Eco -- for contemporary studies concerning semiotics, communication and cognition.

Roman Jakobson stands alone in his semiotic theory of poetic analysis which combines semiotics, linguistics and structuralist poetics. This groundbreaking book proposes methods for developing Jakobson's theories of communication and poetic function. It provides an extensive range of examples of the kinds of Formalist praxis that have been neglected in recent years, developing them for the analysis of all poetry but, especially, the poetry of our urban future. Throughout the book the parameters of a city poetic genre are proposed and established; the book also develops the theory of the function of shifters and deixis with special reference to women as narrators. It also instantiates an experimental poetic praxis based on the work of one of Jakobson's great influences, Charles Sanders Peirce. Steadfastly adhering to the text in itself, this volume reveals the often surprising, hitherto unconsidered structural and semiotic patterns within poems as a whole.