A semiotic way of being sixty

There are global reasons to celebrate the number “60”. Our life consists of hour after hour of 60 minutes, each of which is further divided into 60 seconds. A marriage lasting 60 years is honored with the designation “Diamond”. This tradition is of particular significance in China, where, for thousands of years, the number 60 has been valued as a semiotic phenomenon. (Da’naoshi), an ancient Chinese who lived over 4,000 years ago, is believed to be the originator of the use of “60” to organize the order of things – the calendar being one of them. The year 720BC saw the first recorded example in Chinese history when a lunar eclipse was documented in terms of the 60-based calendar: a combination of 10 “heavenly” figures and 12 “earthly” figures, which are paired into 60 possibilities that continue in cycles unto eternity. The semiotic significance of 60 is further enhanced by its role in deciphering musical quality, personal characteristics, and the patterns of seismic activities.

On his 60th birthday, Professor Jie Zhang, the de facto “founding father” of the journal Chinese Semiotic Studies, is held in high esteem not only for his personal achievements, but also is celebrated by his colleagues, both Chinese and international, for his outstanding contributions to the development of semiotic studies in China over the past two decades.

Now Treasurer and Member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS), Professor Zhang had a childhood fondness for mathematics, yet he was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages at Anhui Normal University, majoring in Russian language and literature in 1978, when China was only two years past the Cultural Revolution, and regular college education had been resumed for less than a year. Without his consent, life took him on a journey that presented him with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lotman, Bakhtin, Uspensky, Saussure, Peirce, Sebeok, and many other great minds in literary and semiotic studies. After a short period of working as a university librarian, Zhang was admitted to the Faculty of Foreign Literature of the Graduate School affiliated with the China Academy of Social

Sciences, majoring in Russian language and literature, supervised by Professor Zhang Yu, Director of the Institute of Foreign Literature Studies at the China Academy of Social Sciences. He was awarded a Master’s degree in 1987 and a Ph.D. degree in 1992. On two occasions, from April 1995 to April 1996 and from July 2000 to September 2000, he visited Russia to conduct research at the Theoretical Office of the Gorky World Literature Institute of the Russia Academy of Sciences.

At present, Zhang is Dean of the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University. He also serves as President of the Institute of International Semiotic Studies at Nanjing Normal University. He is a professor and doctoral advisor. During the 10th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) in 2009, Zhang was elected Member of the Executive Committee of IASS. His other functions include Academician of the UN International Academy of Information Science, Vice President of the China Association for Linguistic and Semiotic Studies, Vice President of the China Association for Bakhtin Studies, Director of the China Association for Foreign Literature Studies, Director of the China Association for Chinese and Foreign Liberal Theory Studies, President of the Association of Foreign Linguistic Studies in Jiangsu Province, Executive Vice President of the Association of Foreign Literature Studies in Jiangsu Province, Vice Chair of the Committee for Foreign Literature at the Writers’ Association in Jiangsu Province, and Vice President of the Association for Foreign Language Teaching and Research at Colleges in Jiangsu Province. He is also the President of the Editorial Board of Chinese Semiotic Studies, Vice Director of Foreign Literature Studies, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Russian Literary Studies.

Jie Zhang’s research has focused on the application of literary theories to Soviet and Russian semiotic approaches, in particular those of Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspensky. He has published over 60 articles in a variety of academic journals including Dialogue, Carnival, and Chronotope (Issue 3, 1996, Belarus) and The American Journal of Semiotics (Volume 23, 1–4, 2007). His research project “Polyphonic novel theory of Dostoevsky and Bakhtin” was, in 1989, among the first group of projects to receive financial support from China’s National Social Science Fund for Young Scholars. The final result of the project, titled Theoretical studies on polyphonic novels, was published in July 1992 by China’s Lijiang Press; this work was the first academic monograph on Mikhail Bakhtin in China. In 1997, Zhang presided over another research project, “Lotman and his artistic semiotics”, which received support from the National Social Science Fund. With Professor Cheng Kang, Zhang co-authored the first monograph in China on Yuri Lotman’s semiotic theories, Structural and artistic semiotics, published in 2004 by China’s Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. In December 2000, with co-author Professor Jiezhi Wang, Zhang published A history of Russian literary criticism in the 20th century, which represents the first systematic account of the evolution of Soviet and Russian literary criticism in the 20th century, especially that of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, by Chinese scholars.

The year 2004 marked Zhang’s shift towards religious and cultural studies on Russia during the Silver Age. His research project “Russian religious and cultural criticism in late 19th century and early 20th century” received support from the National Social Science Fund, the final result of which is to be published by China’s Peking University Press under the title Exploration towards the truth. He also presided over the translation projects for Bakhtin’s Critique of Freudianism and Marxist linguistic philosophy, Lev Shestov’s Philosophy of tragedy: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and A biography of Mikhail Bakhtin. His chief academic publications have been anthologized in Selected essays of Jie Zhang on literary criticism (Fudan University Press, 2007).

Zhang’s academic career saw another peak in his recent project “A study on the Orthodox Church and Russian literature”, which won the Bid for Major Research Projects in 2015, supported by the National Social Sciences Foundation.

Zhang has committed himself to semiotic methodologies in the reinterpretation of literary texts, hypothesizing that the task of literary criticism resides in the exploration of interpretative spaces of literary texts, and that semiotic studies can contribute to pluralism in the world. Given this conviction and scholarly perspective, Jie Zhang has enabled Chinese semioticians to reach out to and gain recognition within the international semiotic community. Over the past twenty years, his collaborations with former and current presidents and other bureau members of IASS, including Roland Posner, Eero Tarasti, Paul Cobley, Youzheng Li, Augusto Ponzio, Susan Petrilli, Paul Bouissac, Charls Pearson, to name just a few, have produced tremendous achievements, from the Chinese Roundtable during the 2009 IASS World Congress in Spain to the 2012 IASS World Congress (Nanjing, China) hosted for the first time by an Asian country, and from the launch in 2009 of Chinese Semiotic Studies to its current publication (since 2014) by De Gruyter Mouton and Nanjing Normal University.

For over 4,000 years, in Chinese culture, the number 60 has been interpreted as the completion of one cycle and the beginning of a new one. For a Chinese, reaching the age of 60 is thus a momentous event in one’s life, one that engenders feelings of highest esteem and respect for the celebrant. With the scholarly contributions by Paul Cobley, Kristian Bankov, Anne Hénault, Mohamed Bernoussi, Susan Petrilli, Priscila Borges, Daina Teters, Gloria Withalm, John Deely, Klaus-Uwe Panther, Augusto Ponzio, Eero Tarasti, Shiyan Xu, Hongbing Yu, and the superb editorial support from Linda L. Thornburg, Youyi Zhu, and Yongxiang Wang, we offer this Festschrift to Professor Jie Zhang, who celebrates a semiotic way of being 60.