Volume 19, Issue 2 - Cultural Signs and Sign Theories

In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World , Haruki Murakami plays with the quantum idea of the Many Worlds theory, creating two universes that exist in a state of parallelism – one consisting of the main character’s objective/subjective reality, the other being a pre-objective reality that resides within the character’s inaccessible subconscious mind. These universes are linked within the purely objective, surreal world of the novel by a series of indexical signs and symbols that point the reader back and forth between the worlds, indicating that they are linked by certain shared subjectivities. What follows here is an exploration of how Murakami’s novel works from a semiotic point of view.

As a unique literary theory, Andrei Bely’s symbolism is a religious world view, and his “symbols” are deeply rooted in the symbolist’s cognition of world structure. This distinct world view exerts a special effect on Bely’s exploration of the poetic mechanism of symbolism. In the practice of completing the creation of symbolic image, the construction of symbolic text, and the achievement of artistic function, word, rhythm, and color are among the most important and necessary conditions to help Bely produce a polyphonic aesthetic effect.

The present article addresses the typical linguistic forms of Mandarin Chinese with regard to the grammatical gender of the language, for which the whole text is articulated in different segments that explain the nature of “feminine” and “masculine” in Chinese and their historical implications, taking into account how distant it may be for speakers of Indo-European languages. The study then discusses some examples of sinograms that use the “feminine” radical in their graphical materializations, which sometimes brings semantic connotations to the sinogram itself. In addition, the text reflects on the third-person pronoun in Mandarin and the historical evolution it has undergone. Finally, the article explains some sinograms that are used to mark gender, especially in relation to animals or animate beings.

This study focuses on the British English version of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin , a series of adventure comics created from 1929 to 1976. The series became increasingly popular throughout the mid-twentieth century and remains so even to the present day. However, it is still a subject of intrigue and controversy for many scholars due to the alleged racist/ethnic stereotypes in this series in terms of the visual representations and narratives. This paper explores the construction of the most frequently occurring non-European ethnic groups in the Tintin series, the East Asians, focusing on selected character roles regarding their functions, ethnicity, and dispersion throughout different narrative plots in three volumes where they were depicted. To that end, this research integrates Vladimir Propp’s narrative analysis and Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak’s discourse historical approach to critical discourse studies, while drawing on parts of Theo van Leeuwen’s social semiotic model in the analysis of images as well as Teun A. van Dijk’s strategies of positive-Self and negative Others presentation. The findings show some idiosyncrasies in terms of East Asians’ distinctive national identities and the dynamicity between the macro-strategies of positive Self versus negative Other representations in the series while touching on the concept of “internal Others.”

In this paper, I would like to examine, within a semiotic framework, two contrasting views of the contemporary culture of Japan – which is still relatively little-known outside its own shores. First, there is the outsider’s view , according to which Japan is firmly situated in the “Far East”. This is the usual interpretant of subject-sign Japan, which is taken to refer – as its object-sign – to all that is different from the “West”: language, culture, society, manners, et cetera. In other words, this is Japan still masquerading as the “Mysterious East”. The second view of Japan is that of insiders : mostly ethnic Japanese – but with nearly 3 million residents of different ethnicities. Beginning in the mid-1800s, Japan set out to modernise itself. By the mid Meiji Period (1887), the government had adopted the slogan Datsu-A, Nyû-Ô , literally ‘Get out of Asia/embrace Europe’. As a result, in many areas (health care and longevity, income distribution, education, public safety, public and personal cleanliness, social politeness, respect for the law, architectural technology, precision manufacturing, and cuisine), Japan is in a league of its own. The object-signs of this newer Japan are all non-Asian aspects of Japanese culture. Their interpretant is the “Far West”.

As a common translation practice, transliteration has been a constant topic in translation studies. In contrast to related fruitful practice, there is a lack of interest in it at the theoretical level. Most studies take transliteration as a ruled-based sound transferring process, neglecting its complexity and multi-functions. This paper affords a Peircean semiotic analysis of the inner workings of transliteration as a sign activity. It proposes treating transliteration as a multidimensional semiosis, whose efficacy in cross-cultural communication lies in the interdependency of three semiotic properties, namely, iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity. With a case study of cultural word transliterations in the Chinese classic Shan Hai Jing , this study further exemplifies the linguistic, cognitive, and cultural functions of transliteration derived from the abovementioned properties. I propose a three-dimensional working mechanism of transliteration dominated by the axes of sign transformation, sign interpretation, and sign interaction. The aim is to bring forward an innovative perspective in transliteration studies, thus providing reference to future practice.

We consider the substitution of living classical texts with their simulacra, kitschy interpretations, to be one of the most important issues in literary education in schools. Traditional teaching methods and textbooks reproduce a set of pedagogical clichés. This leads to a loss of the skill of reading. As a result, the student gains a set of simple narratives about canonical texts, not the knowledge of them. The goal of our study is to give impetus to developing the classics. We think that this development is possible if teachers work with the text, starting with deconstruction of the narrative and clichés surrounding it, applying methods of analysis that are typical for the humanities, in particular semiotic analysis, formal analysis, and narrative analysis. Dominants and metaphors may become a starting point for transmedia extensions, which is extremely important for students’ subsequent independent creative work. We propose an approach to working with literary texts in a manner which stimulates the reader’s personal creativity in the process of becoming acquainted with classics. We have used the example of famous film adaptations and theatrical stagings of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, as well as multimedia projects by trainees from grades 7–11.

News media play a potentially vital role in promoting how people perceive and evaluate people with autism spectrum disorder. While there is an extensive literature on verbal texts of media representations of people with autism spectrum disorder, there is little on the way that such discourses are realized and disseminated visually. This study, based on the framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis, examines the features of images in media coverage of people with autism spectrum disorder within an official Chinese newspaper from 2008 to 2019. The findings indicate that people with autism spectrum disorder are portrayed in the corpus as deficient in communication, deviating from the norm, pathological, and in need of medical intervention and family assistance, as well as having somewhat special talents. The findings also demonstrate that images in the corpus seem to reinforce stereotypes of people with autism spectrum disorder to a greater or lesser extent.

This study accounts for how parody enters such official political discourse as Chinese Government Work Reports (GWRs). It quantitatively and qualitatively studies parodies from 44 GWRs (1978–2021) via the convergence-economy, variation-effectiveness, and relevance model. Our findings are: 1) parodies have appeared more and more frequently in GWRs over the last 44 years; 2) word parodies occur more frequently in GWRs than phrase, sentence, and paragraph parodies; 3) brand-new parodies, of higher pragma-rhetorical values, are used in GWRs; 4) parodies tend to reoccur mimetically once utilized, for ready-made security and effectiveness; and 5) the increasing frequency of parodies is caused by the politicians’ quest for their identification-oriented “markedness effects.”