Volume 2013, Issue 195

Résumé Nous entendons montrer ce que peut être une fiction cubiste, en étudiant deux romans de Claude Simon : L'Herbe (1958) et La Route des Flandres (1960). La matière théorique pour cette démonstration nous est fournie : (a) par un corpus d'ouvrages d'histoire de l'art consacrés au cubisme ; (b) par un certain nombre d'études portant sur la construction énonciative, narrative et syntaxique de H et de RF  ; (c) par les travaux décisifs d'Alain Rabatel sur la “construction textuelle du point de vue,” qui ont permis d'étayer notre thèse par des données linguistiques très précises. Nous montrons en fait que H et RF donnent à voir une transposition littéraire des techniques picturales mises au point lors de la période “analytique” du mouvement cubiste (rabattement de plans, emploi de “facettes,” création de “passages”?). On retrouve dans H et RF des équivalents textuels de ces techniques quand on étudie les modalités de la “mise en perspective” du référent fictionnel, en fonction des paramètres suivants : (a) la nature des données perceptuelles filtrées par le focalisateur ; (b) les modes d'inscription de son PDV dans le texte ; (c) les modalités de référenciation du focalisé (vision, profondeur, volume). En effet, Simon fait subir à tous ces paramètres en même temps des variations si importantes qu'elles détruisent les mécanismes de vraisemblabilisation psychologique régulant la gestion du flux informationnel et l'agencement des différents centres de perspective dans les romans “réalistes,” ce qui confère à l'univers narratif de H et de RF une “apparence polyédrique” typiquement cubiste.

The objective of this article is to analyze Lost from the perspective of transmedia storytelling and to propose a taxonomy of transmedia expansion/compression strategies. In the first section, the article presents the basic components of transmedia storytelling from a theoretical point of view that combines narratology and semiotics. After describing the most important components of Lost 's transmedia fictional universe in the second section, the article presents a general description and taxonomy of expansion/compression narrative strategies based on traditional rhetorical categories. The article also analyzes “compressed texts” – like recapitulations – and their role inside the expansive strategies.

This article first examines and compares three partly overlapping terms – visual semiotics, pictorial semiotics, and the semiotics of art – and aims at the specification of their interrelations. Then, the focus shifts to the problems of the semiotics of art, and the changing mutual relations between the semiotics of art and art history are analyzed. It is important to note that, during the last half-century, the notions of visual art, its ontology, and functions have thoroughly changed and, during recent decades, changes have also appeared on the meta-level of art history. The question is whether and how the semiotics of art should react to these changes.

This essay is dedicated to a special problem in translation studies, that of communication among and across genres, that is, inter-genre or trans-genre communication. What is involved is communication among singularities that calls for a semioethic approach. Semioethics applied to translation contributes to evidencing the limits of the humanism of identity and to paving the way towards the humanism of otherness. “Semioethics of translation” arises in the context of global semiotics and keeps account of the relation between signs, values, and behavior.

Repetition is of interest to both psychoanalysis and poetry. In this paper, I read Shakespeare's first sonnet through a unique form of repetition – the rhyme. More specifically, and from a semiotic perspective, I read the rhyme in Shakespeare's sonnet as a sign uncovering unconscious conflicts concerning objects' relations. This interpretation locates banned masturbation, a major theme of the sonnet, within three resonating threads: the socio-cultural context, the psychological context of internal object relationships, and the context of poetic creativity.

It is generally acknowledged that we live in an increasingly visual culture, populated with a variety of visual objects. Researchers have recently started to investigate the underlying regularities, the “visual grammar,” according to which these objects are assembled. While most existing studies base their analysis on products (such as advertisements, movies or pages from newspapers), this paper studies the processes through which such products are assembled, thereby investigating visual grammar in practice. The particular objects analyzed are storyboards that were produced by secondary school pupils using a new computerized storyboarding tool as part of their engagement with Shakespeare's Macbeth . The paper focuses on situations in which pupils explicitly discuss and negotiate the placement of speech bubbles, thereby revealing aspects of the “meaning-effects” of such placements.

Knowledge Management (KM) concerns the study of knowledge in organizations. Knowledge sharing, use, storage, support, and knowledge creation are components of KM. The (short) history of KM shows that the theoretical foundations of KM require completion. In this article, a perspective on KM is discussed based on cognitive semiotics, which starts with humans as information processing systems. Knowledge is human-oriented. In order to formulate a conceptual framework for the determination and dynamics of knowledge with respect to humans, we modify the I-Space model as suggested by Boisot (1995) and replace it with the K-space model. Based on the cognitive semiotics view, the K-space model works with knowledge content and knowledge types (the way knowledge is (re)presented). Three knowledge types are discerned and discussed: sensory, encoded, and theoretical knowledge (based on various semiotic dimensions). With these knowledge types, “snapshots” of knowledge of individuals and organizations can be made and the dynamics of knowledge can be assessed. This article also contains an empirical study of planning support in a health care institution, bringing the model to a test. The results show an increase in the encoding of knowledge with respect to various sub-tasks of planning. We argue that KM definitely benefits from a cognitive semiotic infusion strengthening its theoretical foundation and leading to empirically corroborated results.

Through a team fieldwork study that entailed participant observation and creating a database of visual images (September 2010), this study seeks an understanding of semiotic fortition as a natural process. Natural semiotic processes are conceptualized here following the tenets of Natural Linguistics (e.g., Stampe 1979[1973]; Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2002). Of particular relevance as a research category is the dyad of lenitions (the processes serving the demands of the speaker/sender of the message) and fortitions (those serving the listener/the receiver). We claim that these are in fact semiotic categories (perceptually based) and transpose them in the study of semiotic boundaries as a dynamic event (e.g., Newman 2003; Lotman 1973 [1970]). The fortitive processes are studied as a case study of the Holy Icon of Our Lady of Licheń, Sorrowful Queen of Poland (Matka Boska Licheńska Bolesna Królowa Polski), which is kept in one of the currently most important Catholic pilgrimage centers in Poland. In conclusion, analytic results are substantiated by perceptual saliency tests on the most popular Marian representations, administered to 113 university students.

In order to offer a typology of dialogue that captures the complex and multifaceted nature of dialogues, we should take into account two factors: (1) the basic kind of interaction between the two interlocutors; the wide variety of specific interactions can be grouped under three general headings: echo-dialogue, whereby one participant repeats what the other has said; dialogue-of-the-deaf, whereby the two participants neither listen to nor understand one another; and dialectical-dialogue, in which the two participants are able to listen to and understand one another, albeit representing different points of view or sentiments. (2) The second factor is the distinction between the outer and the inner level of dialogue. This distinction characterizes any semiotic phenomenon, and derives from the distinction between linguistic form and content. The article argues that there is no automatic correspondence between the kind of interaction that occurs on one level and that taking place on the other. By using only these two factors we gain a systematic and elegant typology of dialogues that enables us to offer nuanced descriptions of a wide range of dialogical interactions in literary texts, notably in drama – as illustrated in the article.

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Borges challenges the veracity of any discourses that presents itself as Truth, particularly pertaining to master narratives such as philosophy and History, and engages in a deconstruction of these narratives. In order to this, Borges introduces a number of strategies: a) the cancellation of the difference between fiction and reality, b) the creation of a world based on a marginal comment in his own narration, and c) the circulation and dissemination of discourse that pretends to have an ontological reality. In what follows we will examine these three strategies which Borges uses to construct the truth of Tlön.

This article presents a tool of fictional analysis for secondary education that aims at providing standards of interpretation and allaying fears of standard imposition. The semantic core of the tool adapts the deontic, alethic, and axiomatic modalities used in Doležel (1998). Four “extensions” are added to this core – “cultural,” “visual,” “(meta)cognitive,” and “epistemic” – which above all mediate between student experience and pure abstraction, and invite students to think with and about tools and texts rather than blindly apply models. The relationship of the tool with literary theory and the appropriate age for learning such a tool are also discussed.

This paper discusses the relation between Leibniz's and Peirce's semiotics, especially derived from some of Peirce's unpublished manuscripts, and briefly resumes Leibniz's role in Peirce's scientific and philosophical development. It is argued that not only did Peirce consider Leibniz a great philosopher, but he also regarded him as a pioneer of semiotics.

Ergotism was a terrible plague in southern Italy in the second millenium, especially in the regions of Basilicata and Calabria, and yet, there is a serious lack of scholarship on the subject. In the absence of multidisciplinary studies, some scholars deny that ergotism even existed historically in these regions. The scarcity of original sources and the abundance of indirect evidence and clues call for an adductive, multidisciplinary method of investigation. This article is divided into three sections. The first part provides a medical-pharmacological explanation of the causes and effects of the disease; the second analyzes the agriculture and diet in southern Italy, highlighting the extremely favorable conditions for the pathology as well as describing local traditions. The last section explores the magical-religious implications of the cult of Saint Anthony Abbot, thaumaturge of plants, animals, and men, divinity par excellence of ergotism, whose votive offerings outnumbered those of all other saints in southern Italy for centuries. With the demise of the Order of Saint Anthony, other autochthonous saints began fulfilling the same functions, demonstrating that ergotism continued to be a serious problem into the eighteenth century.

Apart from human languages, few sign systems are as complex and powerful as programming languages. In fact, programming languages share all the essential features of human languages. The semiotic study of programming languages can therefore contribute to our understanding of human semiosis, in addition to being an interesting and worthwhile topic of analysis in its own right. Tanaka-Ishii's Semiotics of programming focuses on the semiotic examination of programming languages, but also provides important insights into human semiosis in general and into the clarification of semiotic theories. This review article examines how essential issues related to semiotics and human languages are addressed in the book.