Semiotics and ancient history
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You-Zheng Li
Abstract
This article attempts to reformulate the relationship between two major interdisciplinary fields, semiotics and historiography, with both theoretically supporting each other within the interdisciplinary context of human sciences. On the one hand, semiotics is to enlarge its theoretical horizon in terms of historical theory and, on the other, historical theory will be reconstructed in terms of a semiotic approach. The two academic renovations can impact not only the theoretical structure of the humanities but also the way of social-political praxis of mankind. Besides, the author raises a new semiotic classification of historiography as a discipline that is not based on epochal periods but on the modes of producing historical texts. As a result, traditional ancient history is better reduced to a new intellectual history that, instead of historical facts, focuses on modes of historical faiths and their evolutionary trends. Either historical facts or historical faiths should be investigated in a rational and positive way. A practical result derived from this theoretical elaboration is a new positive view towards the true origin of historical faiths.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Théorie du récit et sémiotique: apport d'A. J. Greimas et nouvelles propositions
- Comments regarding Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of consciousness, abduction, and the hypo-icon metaphor
- Purification of medical terms in Turkish: A study on the significance of mother tongue for language and thought
- Terminological equivalence in legal translation: A semiotic approach
- Dissent and environmental communication: A semiotic approach
- From frontrunners, to paper dolls, to fiends: Semiotic analyses of premeditated teacher images
- Wittgenstein as Mastersinger
- Ambiguity and metaphor
- Emotion and community in a semeiotic perspective
- Saussure and the elusive question of the origin
- Towards applied semiotics: An analysis of iconic gestural signs regarding physics teaching in the light of theatre semiotics
- Resistance and rescue in Beauvoir's The Blood of Others and The Mandarins: A semiotic contribution to the thinking of the ‘being-for-other’ existential category
- Communication resources and the consequences of linguistic censorship
- Whewell's metaphorical usage of light and the ultimate reality underlying it
- What do the ten commandments do? A study of lawyers' semiotics
- Narcissus in language: A semiotic contrast of natural and computer language through self-reference
- Multi safe compound constructions: A reply to Anders Søgaard
- On the linguistic expression of subjectivity: Towards a sign-centered approach
- Semiotics and ancient history
- Textual mapping of imitation and intertextuality in college and university mission statements: A new institutional perspective
- Catchments, growth points, and the iterability of signs in classroom communication
- The role of structures in semiotic systems: Analysis of some ideas of Leonardo da Vinci and the portrait Lady with an Ermine
- Biosemiotics: Protoscience, interdiscipline, new biology
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