Volume 2012, Issue 189

The Western world, especially America, has had a longstanding interest in re-interpreting the character of Sindbad. After providing a historical context for Sindbad's entry into Western consciousness, this paper will describe and analyze the way in which Sindbad has been transformed by his reinterpreters. The first half will describe the circumstances surrounding the translation of the Nights , revealing the loss of cultural context and cultural content that left Sindbad's character as a role that needed to be filled. The character of the Mediterranean corsair, based in history, the paintings of Racim, and most of all the model set forth by Byron, would fill this role, so that in movies there was an increasing tendency to imagine him as Greek. Behind this reinterpretation of Sindbad is a narcissistic love, which will be shown as the force behind centuries of trying to adopt the character of Sindbad as an inheritor of Greekness, and therefore a part of the West's Greek inheritance.

Drawing on research in narrative theory and literary aesthetics, text and discourse processing, phenomenology and the experimental cognitive sciences, this paper outlines an embodied theory of presence (i.e., the reader's sense of having entered a tangible environment) in the reading of literary narrative. Contrary to common assumptions, it is argued that there is no straightforward relation between the degree of detail in spatial description on one hand, and the vividness of spatial imagery and presence on the other. It is also argued that presence arises from a first-person, enactive process of sensorimotor simulation/resonance, rather than from mere visualizing from the perspective of a passive, third-person observer. In sections 1 to 3, an inter-theoretical argument is presented, proposing that presence may be effectively cued by explicit (or strongly implied) references to object-directed bodily movement. In section 4, an attempt is made at explaining which ways of embedding such references in the narrative may be particularly productive at eliciting presence.

The focus of this article is a discussion of the analysis of proper names within the city space, viewed not so much from the perspective of the user of an arbitrary sign but rather from the perspective of the icon. The view of language as a structure that includes nonconventional elements is the starting premise for the article, in which iconicity (despite its subordinate character) plays an important function, as represented by such authors as Jakobson. Different types of proper names (mainly those of apartment blocks, shops, firms, restaurants and cafés) that realize endophoric and egzophoric iconicity are presented and discussed. The former type denotes iconic relations of the type sign (name)-referent, i.e., the relationship between a sign and a non-linguistic element, while the latter type of similarity includes the references, sign (name)-sign (name). These refer to relations between proper names. Appropriate names that fulfill a given iconicity are subsequently identified and distinguished within the two types.

The transformations that took place during the last thirty years in the social position and performance of the circus in Britain are observed through their backstage manifestations, with a particular attention to the position and roles of the circus women. The “traditional circus” that originated in the crisis of modernity was characterized by the performance of the traveler, its family-based organization, and the particular position of the women at the center of the family's daily life and long term working together. General social and cultural shifts towards consumerism, play, intensified mobility, and individuation, turned the circus performance and traveling irrelevant, and with it also its family basis and the centrality of the women's role. The “Contemporary Circus” is working in a new cultural environment. Its performance is different. It works a different organization and gender regimes.

Why do some Navajo poets write poetry that describes “ugliness” on the Navajo Nation and what do they believe they are doing by writing that poetry? I examine those questions by focusing on Blackhorse Mitchell's poem “Beauty of Navajoland.” I first discuss a performance of this poem to a Navajo and non-Navajo audience at Swarthmore College. I turn to discussions I had with Mitchell about his poetry and this poem. Contrary to an injunction on the Navajo Nation to dooajinída “don't talk about it,” Mitchell and other Navajo poets argue that it is only by talking about it that the “ugliness” can be restored to “beauty.” We need to understand these terms as bivalent terms — the iconicity of linguistic forms across languages — that reside in two linguistic systems.

Adam Schaff (b. March 10, 1913, Lwów — d. November 12, 2006, Warsaw) was a Polish Marxist philosopher with a special interest in philosophy of language and semiotics, in theory of knowledge and political economy. He focused on problems of semantics, theory of ideology, the relation between language and reality, formal logic, and dialectics. But he also showed a great interest in ethics dealing with the problem of the human individual and the relation between humanism and Marxism. Concerning this aspect he evidenced the connection between the interpretation of Marxism and translation of Marxian terminology, showing the influence of ideology in the practice of translation. As a polish philosopher, Schaff oriented his analysis in a semiotic sense, examining in particular the symptomatology of today's social politics. During the 1980s, he promoted a series of meetings in different countries throughout Eastern and Western Europe to analyze and compare the different versions in different languages of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 from a semiotic perspective. Certain of the topical relevance of his work in semiotics, in this paper we examine a series of issues at the center of Schaff's attention such as the conception of the human individual, the relation between language and knowledge, language and dialectics, the influence of ideology in translation, linguistic fetishism and stereotypes, critique of Chomskyian theory of language, and of hypostatization of such concepts as “structure” and “structuralism.”

Based on Peircean semiotics, this article connects a certain concept of advertising composition with instinct to demonstrate how a specific type of print advertisement prompts a creative kind of comprehension in its reception. Thus, the article proposes that creativity as a phenomenon in advertising and comprehension may be understood semiotically on the basis of composition and the Peircean guessing instinct. The overarching purpose of the article is to show exactly how a Peircean semiotic approach can contribute to research into compositional and cognitive mechanisms in creative advertising, within the framework of ongoing cognitive research in the advertising tradition.

This paper examines narrative form as a cognitive tool for logical thinking in the performance of advanced mental actions through interpreting activity. In particular, the observation of the feature of the triadic relation in Peirce's semiotic system in narrative categorical elements is a key factor in seeing how consciousness operates. Under this aspect, it is possible to see that two different entities of emotion and cognition come together for a purposeful interpreting activity as semiosis. This triadic relation can be applied to new media text in three categorical elements of narrative: form, medium, and genre. This will form my argumentation in the present paper.

With narrative judgments as its central concern, this paper pursues four major goals. It begins with a delineation of the general theses about narrative judgments elaborated by James Phelan. Second, it attempts to examine the interrelations among different types of narrative judgments. Third, it makes a detailed analysis of the effects of narrative judgments. Fourth and finally, it tries to present some critical reflections on Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative judgments, suggesting some potential issues for further investigation.

There exist two kinds of fundamental signs and significance-effects. A normative fundamental sign and a sub-cognitive fundamental sign; a normative significance-effect and a sub-cognitive significance-effect, also called quasi-empathy. The normative fundamental sign and significance-effect appear within the scientific knowledge domain, where there is a stringent terminology. The sub-cognitive fundamental sign and significance-effect exist within all kinds of communities as a condition for the normative fundamental sign and significance-effect. The aim of this article is to show how it is possible to suggest a normative fundamental sign for a community, which is — not yet at least — scientific and provide this community a starting point for becoming scientific.

Building on research in systemic functional approaches to multimodal discourse analysis, this paper develops macro-analytical and micro-analytical techniques for transcription and analysis of a multimodal advertisement film text. This paper proposes the usefulness of the visual semantics stratum to investigate inter-frame relations in the multimodal film text. This approach is applied to an analysis of a teacher-recruitment television advertisement commissioned by the Singapore's Ministry of Education where the construction of an ideal teacher's identity becomes a form of commodification within a consumerist culture. The meanings in the advertisement are also discussed in light of prevailing ideologies in Singapore's education system.

It is widely held nowadays that Saussurean semiology and the Peircean theory of signs are two major semiotic schools that, although they have certain theoretical and historical background in common, are incommensurable. However, it appears that numerous — and evidently strong — points of incongruence between Saussurean (and post-Saussurean) semiology and Peirce's semiotics do not prevent the possibility of some important theoretical intuitions common to both traditions. In particular, this claim finds support in light of Russian formalism — essentially a Saussurean-type semiotic school that gained wide acclaim in mid-twentieth century Europe alongside French structuralism. Without challenging the truth of the obvious differences between the two schools, this paper undertakes to reinterpret some of the late formalist concepts on the problem of continuity in terms of Peirce's semiotics. The brief account this paper presents has a double objective: (1) to give a particular example of how some basic formalist analytical categories may be placed in the wider context of Peirce's semiotics, thus making the purely structural aspect of meaning a particular case of Peirce's theory of signs, and (2) to show the possibility of building a case in which Peirce's semiotic ideas might actually be applied as efficient tools in the examination of different traditional discourses. This objective is accomplished by way of a sample analysis of Vladimir Propp's “Oedipus in Light of Folklore” in terms of Peirce's “On a New List of Categories.”

Semiotics and communication are interrelated concepts. This review essay examines seventeen distinct perspectives on these concepts. They include the following: (1) detailed discussions of Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of the sign; (2) semiotics and semioethics in global communication; (3) critical and feminist approaches to signs and communication; (4) signs, communication and cultural systems; and (5) signs and artistic communication. The papers in this volume derive from a yearlong series of lectures sponsored by the Department of Linguistic Practices and Text Analysis at the University of Bari (Italy) from November 1999 to May 2000.