Recently added articles from The American Journal of Semiotics:
Preface: Semiotics in the Chinese Umwelt
Jan 01, 2007; Tsai, Hsiu-chih ... (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) In a novel effort to acquaint The American Journal of Semiotics with current developments in semiotics in the sinophone world, this special issue, "Semiotics in the Chinese Umwelt", encompasses a great diversity of genres, spanning a ...
The Rise of Chinese Literary Theory: Intertextuality and System Mutations in Classical Texts
Jan 01, 2007; Chang, Han-liang ... Abstract: In traditional Chinese literary criticism, textual strategies comparable to intertextuality have governed Chinese critics' and poets' reading and writing about literature throughout the dynasties. Drawing on the intertextual theories of Kristeva and Riffaterre, the paper probes ...
East Asian Semiotics: Graphic Interpretations of Body, Mind and the Universe
Jan 01, 2007; Cheng, Dennis C H ... Abstract: In East Asia, there has been a long tradition of using graphs and diagrams to express abstract ideas. This paper is to give an account of the East Asian methods for representing body, mind and the universe. The fundamental ideas of East Asian graphic interpretation mostly ...
Signification and Performance of Nonverbal Signs in the Confucianist Ritual System
Jan 01, 2007; Li, You-zheng ... Abstract: The Confucianist learning of rites and related code systems are full of performing details realized in patterned conducts, programmed processes and multiple-media-emblematic network most of which exhibit themselves as nonverbal signs and rhetoric. Those nonverbal ritual codes ...
Distinguishing Reality from Discourse in Chinese: Historiography from a Point of View of Historical Semiotics
Jan 01, 2007; Li, Youzheng ... Abstract: Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural semiotics will systematically change the present-day academic compartmentalization, especially impacting the constitution of historiography. Emphasizing the distinction between reality and discourse this paper suggests a new historiographic ...
Three Cornerstones of the Former Soviet Semiotics: A Comparative Study of the Semiotic Theories of Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspenskij
Jan 01, 2007; Zhang, Jie; Ji, Haihong ... Abstract: Bakhtin's social semiotics, Lotman's structural literary semiotics, and Uspenskij's linguistic cultural semiotics are the three important theoretical cornerstones of the mansion of semiotics in the former Soviet Union, whose influences have long gone beyond the territory of the ...
Saussure, Peirce, and the Chinese Picto-phonetic Sign
Jan 01, 2007; Ding, Ersu ... Abstract: Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce are two founding fathers of modern semiotics but, up until fairly recently, their theories have fared differently on the mainland of China, with the former canonized in university textbooks and the latter banished from academic ...
The "Blanks" and the "Writing": A Narratological Description of Spring and Autumn
Jan 01, 2007; Lee, Chi-hsiang ... Abstract: This paper is intended to discourse upon the state of the "blankness" in the first sentence of Spring and Autumn. Chinese traditional scholars tend to explain "blanks" as the "chueh wen( ...)/blanks of text" or the "pu shu ( ...)/unwritten" on the basis of Commentaries. The ...
Can the Uncanny Be Represented?
Jan 01, 2007; Chou, Ying-hsiung ... Abstract: If the uncanny is something one cannot quite come to terms with in the first place, can the uncanny really be represented? There is clearly in the act itself something quite against the grain of referentiality. What in other words is the point of saying that which cannot very ...
Female Sexuality: Its Allurement and Repression in Geling Yan's "White Snake"
Jan 01, 2007; Tsai, Hsiu-chih ... Abstract: This paper aims at addressing how the question of Chinese female sexuality is questioned and challenged by the Chinese woman writer Geling Yan's novella "White Snake" (1999). By adopting a similar title to the famous traditional Chinese monster story that narrates a white ...
A Chinese Sinthome: Chan, Modern Subject and Politico-Semioticizing Dream of the Red Chamber
Jan 01, 2007; Liao, Hsien-hao Sebastian ... Abstract: Aiming at the long repressed politico-semiotic dimension of Dream of the Red Chamber, this essay employs Lacanian theories of discourse and subjectivity in conjunction with the Chan Buddhist idea of enlightenment to analyze the coming into being of the what Zizek defines as a ...
From the Sublime to the Obscene: Modalities of Totalitarianism and Jouissance
Jan 01, 2007; Wang, Yong ... Abstract: Drawing on Yan's novella Serve the People (2005), the author examines the metamorphosis of the titular master signifier that has served as a central moral mandate in the Chinese Communist Party's ideological discourse. Relying on a Lacanian framework via Zizek's and others' ...
Bodily Movement and Geographic Categories: Xie Lingyun's "Rhapsody on Mountain Dwelling" and the Jin-Song Discourse on Mountains and Rivers
Jan 01, 2007; Cheng, Yü-yü ... Abstract: While studies of Chinese landscape literature usually focus on landscape poetry (shanshui shi ...), I wish to take Xie Lingyun's "Rhapsody on Mountain Dwelling" as my point of departure to discuss how the rhapsody draws from the categorization of geographic designations and ...
Presence, Representation, and Significance: An Analysis of Semiotic Structures and Corresponding Conceptions of Nature and Culture
Jan 01, 2007; Moeller, Hans-Georg ... Abstract: This article introduces a semiotic methodology that can be applied in Comparative Philosophy as an alternative to still dominating content-based methods. I suggest distinguishing between three semiotic structures that operate on the basis of different relations between the ...
Space Metaphor as a Signifying Force in Chan Poems
Jan 01, 2007; Tseng, Ming-Yu ... Abstract: This paper analyzes how space is metaphorized in some Chan poems, and it investigates how space metaphor contributes to Chan culture. It concentrates on orientational metaphors, metaphor associated with an upward or/and a downward orientation. Orientational metaphors tend to be ...
The Chinese Strategy of Transcendence
Jan 01, 2007; Hammond, Charles E ... Abstract: Sources of angst in Chinese society, ranging from concerns about the environment to political stability and the ongoing economic reforms have persisted into the late 1990s and early 2000s. While official policy often discouraged directly addressing these anxieties in public ...
The Semiotic Structuration of Home and Identity in A Song of the Sad Coffee Shop
Jan 01, 2007; Tsai, Hsiu-chih ... Abstract: This paper deals with the function of metonymy in A Song of the Sad Coffee Shop (1996), a novel by Taiwan's woman writer Shao-lin Chu (b. 1966). For my reading of the novel's narrative, I should like to appropriate a Jakobsonian understanding of metaphoric and metonymic ...
Psychoanalytic Semiotics and the Interpretation of Dream Paintings: An Example from Salvador Dali
Jan 01, 2007; Ku, Tim-hung ... Abstract: The present paper is divided into two parts. Part one is an attempt to reconstruct the semiotic models of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which concepts from De Saussure, C. S. Peirce, Jakobson, Lotman, Eco are drawn for mutual illumination and synthesis. Psychoanalytic ...
Greimas's Semiotic Square and Its Application in the Anti-corruption Campaign in Mainland China
Jan 01, 2007; Wang, Hong ... Abstract: A semiotic study seeks to find sign significance in its relation with others. This paper is a search for the semiotic manifestation of certain signs in the contemporary campaign against corruption in mainland China. It uses Greimas's semiotic square as a theoretical base upon ...
We Are Digitized Long Before We Have Computers: Analog and Digital Communication in the Written Sign System of Human Communication
Jan 01, 2007; Xia, Yun ... Abstract: As two fundamental modes of communication, analog and digital communication are not only ways of information transmission but also two mental habits in our perception and representation of the perception in the creation of communication sign systems. In a broader sense, analog ...