Volume 2019, Issue 226 -

Résumé  Gaston Lagaffe est apparu en 1957 dans la revue Spirou dans une vignette au milieu d’une page de texte. Dans ce genre de revue de l’époque, le texte côtoyait la bande dessinée éditée sous la forme d’un feuilleton qu’un jour par semaine les jeunes allaient chercher avec avidité afin de savoir ce qui était arrivé à leur personnage préféré. C’est dans ce contexte qu’est né le personnage Gaston. Sa consolidation en tant que personnage puis (anti-)héros se fait petit à petit au fil des numéros, au fil des images et du discours, avec l’intervention des lecteurs, de l’auteur, des personnages qui tendent à s’effacer ou à être effacé pour laisser malgré eux la place à Gaston. C’est à travers la prise de parole de ce personnage, dont le discours était, dans un premier temps, uniquement imagé, qu’il s’est transformé et s’est constitué comme anti-héros. C’est donc l’émergence progressive de Gaston dans l’énonciation que nous allons ici étudier. Nous tenterons de montrer comment un personnage comme Gaston s’approprie l’énonciation visuelle et renverse les valeurs texte / image au profit de l’image / texte au point que le discours repose d’abord sur l’image, reléguant le discours oral (écrit) à certains moments clés qui feront avancer la transformation du personnage. Cette appropriation visuelle, liée à son statut de personnage, ne peut d’ailleurs se faire que grâce à la prise de parole, brève, de Gaston et à l’effacement de son concurrent, Fantasio.

This paper examines how the slogan of the “Chinese Dream” is represented in two western news reports on the CNN and the BBC websites. They are among the first news reports which introduce the “Chinese Dream” into the US and the UK, respectively. The analysis of both the verbal news texts and the visuals shows that the reporters use different discursive strategies to manipulate the ideological orientation of the social actors and social actions in discourse. Through the analysis, this study shows how different discursive resources conceptualized in Theo van Leeuwen’s work, Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis , are used to stereotype “the other’s” politics and political discourse in BBC and CNN’s news texts, and perpetuate a Eurocentric view on perceiving contemporary Chinese political discourse.

The way we perform identity in everyday situations nowadays is affected in very concrete ways by our interactions with technology. However, our conceptual understanding of such exchanges has been limited to a handful of concepts or narrative devices (i.e. a cyborg ), which have proved their limits when facing extreme complexity. This paper develops a proposal to reexamine various possible assemblages between man and machine – at the level of the self-awareness and self-signifying of an individual vis à vis technological-based entities – by revisiting Greimas’s semiotic square, a tool from classical structural semiotics that could be readjusted to unfold what is at stake in that relationship, and under the semantic category of identity. The paper explains the constituent terms of Greimas’s elementary structure of meaning, unfolds the logic of his semiotic square, and develops some of its key underlying notions. Moreover, the limitations of the semiotic square are also surveyed. Instead of trying to pose a new paradigm, this paper wants to explore its heuristic possibilities and resist any claims of the underlying theory to produce fix typologies, semantic determinisms or stable discursive forms. In that sense, the scope of this essay is not to identify the whole array of cases in which identity is formed out of the contact between man and his machinical other , but to deliver a working scheme that may function as an initial, navigational map, a tool by which we can further explore the idea of how identity is affected by technology as a dynamic, performative process, therefore informing a semantic know-how and granting further access to yet unfamiliar fields of a post-human condition.

This work presents a semiotic perspective of aspects of a soundscape evaluation of the city, Supino located in the Province of Frosinone in the Italian region of Lazio. The data and sound sample collection was accomplished through the soundwalk technique undertaken by students of Çankaya University, School of Architecture during the ‘Third International Summer School in Supino’ 17–24 August 2014. For the soundscape evaluation, three zones were identified in Supino as urban, suburban, and intersection. A total of nine samples across three zones were collected during three different times in a day by soundwalks from the areas located in the identified zones. A theoretical model of semiotic interpretations of soundscapes has been proposed and applied for the analysis of Supino’s soundscape. The results showed that the soundscape of Supino differs according to its cultural, habitual, and anthropological tendencies. In addition, the semantic analysis shows that the soundscape composition of the sound sources in the three zones varies by the change of time, sound composition and sources, topography, and settlement of the city.

This article presents a model and a case study of the narrative structures that are present in the interactive media design of multimedia applications in the mass media. As basic categories for the history and structure of media, we employ the model of the modes of the physical, analog, and digital presentation/representation. In this case study of the online edition of the New York Times , we have the case of a newspaper that in the digital edition employs multi-media applications. Contrasting the traditional concept of “narrativity” with the current status quo of the digital media outlets, we will examine the specific conditions of the multimedia applications in the mass media with this sample case of the New York Times . As narrative structure of interactive design in multimedia for mass communication, we analyze the types of narrative media and general narrativity in the New York Times with the background of its processes of interactivity and media convergence.

Since the 1980s Disney has opened a new overseas theme park every decade. After finding success in Tokyo in 1983, subsequent parks in Paris and Hong Kong have struggled to profit financially and connect culturally with locals. For Shanghai in 2016, Disney utilized a new discourse for the parkʼs development and configuration termed “authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese.” In this paper, Disneyʼs emotional branding strategy for Shanghai Disneyland is analyzed using a framework of five antecedents for creating affective attachment to brands. In addition, the pragmatics of the dyadic phrase and the intertextuality of the parkʼs composition demonstrate that unlike previous international Disneylands, Disney blurred and removed cultural and contextual references to America from Shanghai in an effort to achieve resonance with Chinese visitors. The result is Chinaʼs Disneyland, not Disneyland in China. Though Shanghaiʼs revenue and attendance figures are good so far, Disney will likely face challenges to its new emotional branding strategy from within China and the US.

The article offers a Peircean “glimpse” of the normativity of the brand community. The theoretical framework will primarily be Peirceʼs semiotics, while also adding a few insights from his thoughts on (ethical) normativity and the formal conditions of community. Firstly, I will describe the brand community as a semiotic entity based on three inter-related conditions involving “inner” and “outer” processes of branding where “inner process” is where we find the most explicit dynamics of the brand community related to a “common consent of meaning” and a “sense of community.” Secondly, I will try to describe how values and ideals can be understood within the brand community, including how the values and ideals (semiotically) transfer normative meanings by bringing together brands with consumers and thereby affect their feelings, acts, and thoughts so that they can become members within a brand community.

The question of form in Peirce’s early thought constitutes the starting point of his reflection on the connection models of the parts of continua. I will show how, interpreted as reason rather than as cause, form becomes a productive event . In this productive event the form, as “condition of possibility of the relation of the elementary parts of representation” becomes a modeling dynamic which, starting from interpretation, allows initiation of the process of the passage from substance to being. The problem of this passage is the problem of a continuity that cannot be thought by the classical linear model of time.

We live in societies emphasizing security and its complementary side of fear. In this work, I analyze the peripheral messages disseminated in the urban environment, whose function is that of regulating human and collective conduct through orienting specific forms of affective meaning-making. According to the perspective of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics, affect and cognition work always together. Affect has the primacy in the relationship with the world and on top of affective distinctions we build conceptual distinctions. Thus, I describe a type of semiotic process I have called “atmos-fear,” that works through the production of empty representamen that frames meaning. The concept of “atmos-fear” could be fruitfully developed to understand phenomena of politics, communication and construction of the Other in contemporary societies, where the dialogical relationship between security and fear is at stake.

This paper uses a social semiotic perspective to analyze Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage of the US presidential campaign from 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy for nomination as the Republican candidate until 8 November 2016, when he was elected as President of the United States. The paper argues that one of the keys to Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage was that, in presenting himself and his agenda, he foregrounded interpersonal meaning by making himself the focus of attention of the campaign through strategies that invaded various semiotic spaces to form a “sub-semiosphere” of Trump dogma. The effects of this were that what he did and what he said captured the majority of media attention at the expense of his opponents, enabling him to win the election, despite his complete lack of background experience as a politician.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (Singer, I. B. 1962. Yentl the yeshiva boy. Commentary Magazine . https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/yentl-the-yeshiva-boy-a-story/ (accessed 25 March 2017).) needs to be read in the light of traditional Jewish sources. The question is, how does it stand up to modern hypotheses of gender construction? Yentl was originally published in Yiddish and was translated to English in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will see that the context within which to understand the story properly is encoded in the story itself, as Umberto Eco explains in his The Role of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation . We will see how the concept of a person’s gender, as a construction by social norms, is viewed within mainstream Jewish thought. Some textual issues and contemporary ideas of gender are applied to the story. Finally, the feature film Yentl (Streisand, B. (dir.). 1983. Yentl [film]. Los Angeles: United Artists Films.) is also compared the short story on which it was based as an example of translation and re-interpretation.

That which is usually called “common sense” is nothing but the complex deposit of implicit cognitive, pragmatic, and emotional rules through which the members of a society interact with each other and, simultaneously, affirm their belonging to the group. This sense is called “common” both because it is current – meaning that it permeates the daily life of the group in all its manifestations – and because it is shared: it is something that belongs to the community as a whole and something through which, at the same time, the members of the community can belong. What is the relation between “sense” and “common sense”? This question is extremely relevant to semiotics, hermeneutics, and the other disciplines and philosophies of interpretation.

Résumé  Le présent article analyse d’un point de vue sémiotique les rapports entre la /lumière/ et l’/obscurité/ et les catégories discursives au sein d’un corpus de quatre textes de la littérature du dix-neuvième et vingtième siècle. Il s’agit de montrer que les propriétés physiques et sensibles fondent les structures sémio-narratives et orientent les catégories axiologiques, thymiques, spatiales et temporelles. Autrement dit, on observe une primauté de la lumière et de l’obscurité en tant que catégories organisées en structure élémentaire qui génère, par un système de conversion, les unités abstraites et concrètes aux niveaux successifs du parcours génératif.

I wish to correlate Bernard Lonergan’s functional specialty Communications with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of novelistic discourse with the goal of teasing out how the Bakhtinian notion of discourse furthers on-going reflection on inculturation. Theology as a highly differentiated and specialized reflection on religion bears fruit in the final stage (Communications) of theological reflection. This fruit – inculturation – can be explained using different constructs. This paper privileges the Bakhtinian construct in that it addresses “the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-languaged world” in ways that Lonergan’s differentiated and specialized reflection on theology accounts for multiplicity of cultural traditions in an ever-changing world church.