Volume 12, Issue 4

This paper applies my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s theory of the semiotic structure of modern poetry to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land . Contrary to Riffaterre, multilingual examples show that modern poetry is built around not one but two central propositions. Moreover, the ability of the modernist work to change the preconceptions of the reader must be accounted for. This involves a triadic system whose interpretant is seen to have a counterpart in the sociolect, which has similar vocabulary but contrasting internal structure – a contrast that produces a change in the mind of the reader. My analysis shows that this long poem is based on just two kernel propositions, which generate two sets of variant images throughout the text. The result is that the poem has the capacity to change the reader’s preconceptions along religious lines. This influential poem has frequently been misunderstood as simply reflecting the depredations of post First World War Europe. From my analysis we can conclude that, while one proposition is concerned with the degraded state of faithless post-war European society, the other constitutes a semiotic key to the rehabilitation of that society.

This paper anatomizes the cognitive theory of metaphor from the perspective of Peircean semiotics. As is defined by Peirce, iconic reasoning is the underlying logic of metaphor, which is open ended and heterogeneous, and therefore no particular metaphorical schema can be said to claim a monopoly over the structuring of our thinking and behavior. Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive theory, however, seems to follow the Platonic line of ontological realism, which advocates that concepts expressed in a language correspond to real states of things or affairs that exist independently of language. By viewing their “master tropes” as fundamental and prerequisite schemas, Lakoff and Johnson presume the ontological existence of some metaphorical concepts. Such an a priori assumption is not compatible with the polysemous nature of the sign. Consequently, this essentialist approach makes their postulation on metaphor unfalsifiable. What is missing from their framework is a structural space for dynamic interpretation on the part of metaphor users. Peirce’s theory of unlimited semiosis can remedy this deficiency through introducing the concept of “interpretant” as a mediating thirdness, where innumerable semantic features of objects or life situations are rhizomatically linked on the basis of encyclopedic knowledge shared by members of a particular culture.

Competitive and speed eating by now constitute a mainstay in contemporary food culture. This paper outlines an emergent consumptive trend that radiates through Furious Pete’s, a popular professional speed eater, postcolonial omnivorous ethos that is tagged ‘limeating’, denoting eating to the limit or eating the limit. By drawing on the key distinction between drives and desire, I argue that the cultural phenomenon of limeating eludes and at the same time buttresses consumptive desire, while inviting the limeater’s audience to a regressive path to unbound orality, coupled with an indiscriminate will-to-introjection. Furious Pete is shown to be instituting a new hamburger standard that, contrary to the established Big Mac Index, does not concern the relative pricing of Big Macs across cultures, but the annihilation of differentially valorized gastronomic offerings in the face of cannibalistic drives.

Although ritual funeral dances have been present throughout the history of some human societies, it is noteworthy that in some rural areas of countries such as China the funeral striptease as a cultural tradition has been established. The general goal of this work is to understand the presence of the striptease as a component part of funeral rituals in Chinese rural culture. To this end, the works of Finol on anthropo-semiotics (2011), of Lotman on the semiotics of culture (1996, 1998, 1999, 2000), of Peirce on triadic semiotics (1987), of Van Gennep on rites of passage (1984, 2008), and Del Fresno’s concept of Netnography (2011) were used to analyze this phenomenon from an epistemological introspective-experiential approach (Padrón Guillén 2001, 2003). The study concludes with three main findings: the funeral striptease serves as a mask used by humans to hide the fear of death, to give an aesthetic role to death, and to express the underlying nakedness of a person faced with the binomial life/death .

In this paper we explore the marks of discursive heterogeneity in literary works produced in situations of language and culture contact. We analyze novels written by contemporary Chinese authors who live outside the People’s Republic of China and produce their work in English and French: Qiu Xiaolong (裘小龙) and Dai Sijie (戴思杰), respectively. We address marks of heteroglossia and discursive heterogeneity and explore the construction of the narrator and the narratee in their novels. In order to validate our analysis, we compare these authors with a Chinese writer who lives and produces his work in China: Mo Yan’s on his French and Spanish translated novels. Taking into account the discursive strategies deployed and the polyphonic marks, we demonstrate that Qiu and Dai construct Chinese narrators and Western narratees, while Mo Yan constructs Chinese narrators and narratees. In our analysis we apply notions of polyphony from Bakhtin and Ducrot, rhetoric concepts from Olbrecht-Tyteca and Per elman, the notion of discursive heterogeneity by Authier, and the discursive ethos analysis proposed by Maingueneau.