Volume 18, Issue 3

The subject’s perception of the object and the relationship between the two have long been regarded as the main path for human beings to explore the world. In semiotic research, scholars have also mostly adhered to this research idea that the symbolic subject and object remain unified. However, the semiosis of the objective world is extremely complicated, and the interpretation of symbolic meaning varies greatly. Therefore, the cultural semiotics of jingshen challenges the dichotomy of cognitive subjects and objects and proposes a more valuable cognitive model, “I lost myself,” on the basis of Chuang Tzu’s philosophical thought. This paper attempts to interpret the task of the cultural semiotics of jingshen through the guiding idea of “I lost myself.” This indicates that if an individual seeks to comprehend and interpret the symbolic meaning authentically and thoroughly, they must adhere to Dao and escape the bondage of intersubjectivity. This paper hypothesizes that the ultimate purpose of the cultural semiotics of jingshen is to release the symbolic meaning in a broadened space and return it to its original, natural, and unconstrained form.

The aim of the paper is to examine how to bring together the general, large area of “semiosphere” (Lotman), the detailed (“close”) analysis of cultural objects, and the point of the flexible methodology we call interdisciplinary. The semiosphere I address is the (uncertain) one we call “Europe”. The starting point is the semiotic status of the exclamation mark as I have used it to connect two preoccupations in the title of a film I made in 2020. The heart of the analysis is ambiguity, in language as well as in other domains. This serves to enhance the uncertainties that always accompany semiotic analysis, which in my view is for the better. After the comments triggered by my film, I turn to visual art as the apparent “other” of language, but through a reflection on colour, I reject that binary in favour of the more flexible concept of the figural (Lyotard). Throughout the article I also undermine the opposition between still and moving images.

The present paper focuses on the semiotics of historization, that is, of “narration as history” and provides a meta-analysis of the semiotic modeling of Confucius as a case in point. I argue that the personage who has come to be known as Confucius has existed and can only exist, without exception, in multiple forms of sociocultural representation and interpretation that are natural results of distinct modeling processes. These forms compose the immediate realities of Confucius for us and the very foundation upon which any further discussions about Confucius, his disciples, and their thoughts and lives are even possible in the first place. This treatment reminds us of how easily we can fall victim to the objective illusion and the confusion of understanding and axiology that Mieke Bal has rightly cautioned against. Moreover, the paper is by no means intended to be a revisionist or nihilistic denial of the historicity of Confucius, but rather an attempt to underscore the central and fundamental role that modeling systems about historical figures play in historization as human sociocultural and cognitive practice. In this sense, the case of Confucius serves as an instance, a specimen, a sign, which is extensible to any other historical figures.

All cultures produce stories; all humans are storytellers. Hence, by implication, narratives must serve a fundamental cultural and existential function in human life. This article suggests the term “cultural embedment” to characterize this function. This article points out that, for narratives to play the role as a tool for cultural embedment, the double structure of narratives always switches back and forth between an object level and a meta level. To capture this reduplication as a contextualized and historical dynamics, Clifford Geertz’s term “thick description” is introduced together with Jurij Lotman’s conception of culture as an interconnected primary and a secondary modeling system. After a short outline of six important approaches to narratives that have to be taken into account, the article proposes a thick description that characterizes narratives as tools for cultural embedment. A final analytical sketch of Chigozie Obioma’s novel An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) briefly demonstrates a non-formalistic approach to narratives as tools for cultural embedment in a dynamic interchange between several levels.

There can be no narrative text without a narrator. Locating the source of narration is the starting point for an understanding of any narrative. There is no agreement among narratologists, nevertheless, on how the narrator could be located in a narrative text, in a so-called “third-person” fictional narrative, for instance, or in dramatic or cinematic narratives. The narrator should be ubiquitous in theory, yet is extremely elusive in practice. That is why there has hardly been any effort among scholars to offer a description of the general shape of the narrator. The present paper attempts to divide all narratives into a few categories in terms of narratorial transfiguration so as to reveal the narrator’s various shapes, from a fully individuated flesh-and-blood person to a fictionalized character, to an almost totally depersonalized frame. The narrator, however, consistently functions as the source of the narrative discourse, sliding in a frame–person scalar duality, but always integrating both. The narrator’s duality provides the key to a general narratology.

A major mark of the progress of human society is its transition from the production of things in space to the production of space itself. Oral narrative covers a certain range of space with sound, and physical spaces such as theaters, cinemas, and concert halls accommodate various forms of narrative communication. Drama was the most popular form of mass communication in the pre-industrial age, and its performance required a “sound wall” around the theater to keep people focused. Comment and discussion were both significant forms of narrative consumption. Some consumers who paid more attention to “being seen” even regarded the communication arena as a social platform. In present times, commentary subtitles (Danmaku in Japanese) pop up on computer screens from time to time to make consumers feel as if they are chatting with people while watching. “Chatting” in social media groups also belongs to interaction in virtual space. Surround sound in the cinema wraps the audience and screen into a unifying auditory space, blurring or even eliminating the boundaries between them. Narrative has been an act of producing acoustic space from the very beginning. Nowadays, people adopt more abundant narrative means yet still rely on the imitation of auditory communication.

Image narrative was long regarded as imitation of a story already told in word narrative rather than as direct imitation of real life. In the connection between imitation and medium, there are the phenomena of the medium’s own position and “Anders-streben.” The former emphasizes the medium following its own nature, and the latter means not only following its own nature but transcending itself to pursue another aesthetic effect. “Inter” in intermedia narrative goes beyond the nature or strengths of an artistic work and its medium, resulting in a narrative form that showcases the characteristics of other literary works or media rather than giving full play to its own strengths. Of course, the so-called “laws of imitation” outlined by French sociologist Tarde must be followed: (i) imitation from within to without and (ii) imitation of the superior by the inferior. Whether in the former or the latter, word is a more advantageous medium, since it serves more easily as the model for images or other media to imitate in lyric expression or narrative activities. The laws of imitation are the underlying cause why image, as a spatial narrative medium, manages to achieve the corresponding temporal effect by imitating word narrative.

This article argues that metonymy provides “cognitive roundabouts” that semiotically create more meaning in fictional narrative against the popular views that metonymy provides “referential shorthand” and “communicative shortcuts.” In the light of Lakoff and Johnson’s observation on the relationship between symbolic metonymy and the comprehension of religious and cultural concepts, it explores the semiotic potentialities of metonymy in constructing fictional reality with special reference to O. Henry’s short story “The Cop and the Anthem.” It concludes that artistic deployment of metonymic devices comically exploits and explicitizes various conceptual associations and logical relations between the source and the target and requires greater cognitive effort from the reader; in defamiliarizing the fictional representation, the narrative text produces more symbolic meanings and ultimately refamiliarizes the reader with aspects of actual-world reality that are otherwise hardly perceivable.

The Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory is the first encyclopedia of narrative theory in the world to reference the practices of the Chinese narrative tradition and theory. However, the editors have compiled the encyclopedia from the systemic perspective of their knowledge of contemporary Western narratology, focusing on the characteristic differences between contemporary Western narratology and the narrative theories of the so-called ancient non-Western societies. To help overcome this shortcoming, this paper introduces the Chinese narrative tradition from the standpoint of Sinology, attending to the oral/written and history/narrative dichotomies that represent the editors’ academic preferences; additionally, it also provides insights into the characteristics of the varied Chinese narrative theories recorded in the encyclopedia from the perspective of contemporary Western narrative theory, and highlights the Chinese contributions to the construction of the knowledge system of narrative theory.