Conversations with Lotman: The Implications of Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, and Cognition (Toronto Studies in Semiotics & Communication) - Hardcover

Andrews, Edna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802036864 ISBN 13: 9780802036865

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2003

Synopsis

Conversations with Lotman is a critical analysis of Russian cultural historian and theoretician Jurij Lotman's central contributions to the study of semiotics, including his writings on the "semiotics of culture" and the "semiotics of artistic space," and his efforts to model the production of cultural knowledge and how it is shared in any functioning semiotic space. Edna Andrews builds a narrative around Lotman's work by presenting the major principles of his cultural semiotic theory, including his doctrine of signs, his definition of the "semiosphere," and his modelling of communication as a means to create new knowledge and to share old knowledge.

Andrews also examines how Lotman's semiotic constructs relate to structuralist and post-structuralist semiotic theories, the work of other theorists of semiotics such as Charles S. Pierce and Thomas A. Sebeok, to twentieth-century Russian literary texts, and to the cognitive sciences. Andrews grapples with Lotman's difficult, sometimes contradictory, theories of human language, perception, and memory, offering semioticians the opportunity to read the first sustained study of Lotman's work in English.

About this title

About the Author

Edna Andrews is a Professor of Slavic Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

From the Back Cover

'This [book] makes several important contributions, chief among them the initiation of a serious, scholarly engagement with Lotman's impressive legacy and an introduction to key elements in Lotman's thought for semioticians and scholars who cannot read Lotman in the Russian original. The author introduces a number of key Lotman texts and tempts the reader with the depth, scope, and complexity of Lotman's thought.'

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802036864
• ISBN 13: 9780802036865
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208