A carnival pilgrimage: Cultural semiotics in China
-
Hongbing Yu
Yu Hongbing (b. 1984) is a doctoral candidate and research fellow at Nanjing Normal University 〈njnubrandon@126.com 〉. His research interests include semiotics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and cultural communication and change. His publications include “A new cultural-semiotic perspective: Perception of signs and semi-autonomous generation of meaning” (2012); “The back of mnemosyne: A cultural-semiotic analysis of the forgetting mechanism of culture” (2012); and “Enter the dragon: Sebeok's Chinese connection” (2013).
Abstract
This paper reviews the development of Chinese cultural semiotics from the early age of reception to the present day. The return of Cultural Awareness in the late 1970s in China paved the way for the entry of diverse Western thought and led to the so-called “fever of cultural studies” since the 1980s. The dynamic nature of Chinese culture calls for equally dynamic theories and this has provided a perfect opportunity for combining the various newly introduced Western semiotic models and the contemporary studies of Chinese culture. A genuinely fascinating situation, which I name “a carnival pilgrimage,” of cultural semiotics in China, is that each of the diversified semiotic theories has enjoyed a uniquely prestigious status and a fair share of practitioners. Nevertheless, there are four major Western models that are most influential in Chinese cultural semiotics: Saussurean structuralism, the Peircean model, the Russian School, and the Cassirer-Langer model. The seeming confusion of this carnival pilgrimage is actually a reflection of the dynamism and pluralism of global semiotics and is especially advocated and practiced by Chinese semioticians, who have already managed to explore the rich ancient legacies left by early Chinese thinkers of the sign and to establish semiotic centers and publications nationwide.
About the author
Yu Hongbing (b. 1984) is a doctoral candidate and research fellow at Nanjing Normal University 〈njnubrandon@126.com〉. His research interests include semiotics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and cultural communication and change. His publications include “A new cultural-semiotic perspective: Perception of signs and semi-autonomous generation of meaning” (2012); “The back of mnemosyne: A cultural-semiotic analysis of the forgetting mechanism of culture” (2012); and “Enter the dragon: Sebeok's Chinese connection” (2013).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Between the grid and composition: Layout in PowerPoint's design and use
- Beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles: The integration of text and image
- Abstraction as a limit to semiosis
- The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches
- Hearing a shakkei: The semiotics of the audible in a Japanese stroll garden
- Towards a social semiotics of rhythm in popular music
- A carnival pilgrimage: Cultural semiotics in China
- Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term “photography”
- An exploration of possible unconscious ethnic biases in higher education: The role of implicit attitudes on selection for university posts
- New insights into the medium hand: Discovering recurrent structures in gestures
- The multimodal construal of the experiential domain of recipes in Japanese and Chinese
- Cyberterrorist messages: A semiotic perspective
- A necessary condition for proof of abiotic semiosis
- Review of From First to Third Via Cybersemiotics
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Between the grid and composition: Layout in PowerPoint's design and use
- Beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles: The integration of text and image
- Abstraction as a limit to semiosis
- The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches
- Hearing a shakkei: The semiotics of the audible in a Japanese stroll garden
- Towards a social semiotics of rhythm in popular music
- A carnival pilgrimage: Cultural semiotics in China
- Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term “photography”
- An exploration of possible unconscious ethnic biases in higher education: The role of implicit attitudes on selection for university posts
- New insights into the medium hand: Discovering recurrent structures in gestures
- The multimodal construal of the experiential domain of recipes in Japanese and Chinese
- Cyberterrorist messages: A semiotic perspective
- A necessary condition for proof of abiotic semiosis
- Review of From First to Third Via Cybersemiotics
