At a moment when 'literature' threatens to be collapsed into other discourses, or to be subsumed by such terms as 'narrative' and 'genre, ' Jurgen Dines Johansen, although he recognizes its protean nature, focuses on literature itself as it relates to other discourses. Using the semiotic theory of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce as the principal influence, Johansen applies, in a highly erudite fashion, psychoanalysis, psychology, literary hermeneutics, literary history, Habermasian communication, and discourse theory to literature, and, in the process, redefines it.

The...

Teacher education and research on teaching are surrounded by 'a culture of niceness' which can prevent the expression of problems experienced by teachers and researchers. Based on the premise that deconstruction and demystification are a necessary counterforce to 'shared myths, ' Fran?ois Tochon offers a provocative, original assessment of mass educational concepts and teacher education, leading to a challenge of rethinking pedagogy in general.

The author identifies three shaping metaphors: 'productivity' (output standardization; business efficiency), 'warfare' (strategy;...

Conversations with Lotman is a critical analysis of Russian cultural historian and theoretician Jurij Lotman's central contributions to the study of semiotics, including his writings on the "semiotics of culture" and the "semiotics of artistic space," and his efforts to model the production of cultural knowledge and how it is shared in any functioning semiotic space. Edna Andrews builds a narrative around Lotman's work by presenting the major principles of his cultural semiotic theory, including his doctrine of signs, his definition of the "semiosphere," and his modelling of...

In Narratology and Text, Paul Perron examines the role that literature plays in the formation of French Canadian identity. Perron presents a narratological and semiotic analysis of canonical non-fictional and fictional texts from New France and Quebec, and illustrates how citizens of French Catholic origins living in Canada have constructed their identity by defining the self as part of a closed community founded in race, language, and religion, and as radically opposed to the other, constituted as an omnipresent heterogeneous threat to the homogenous group.

The first section...

In Sensing Corporeally, Floyd Merrell argues that human sensation and cognition should be thought of in terms of continually changing signs that can be accounted for in terms of topological forms. Focusing on qualitative and analogical sensing, rather than quantitative and digital reasoning, Merrell begins by reflecting on the concept of consciousness as developed by neurologist Antonio Damasio, whose work in turn reflects Charles Peirce's conception of the sign. By expanding Peirce's notion of the sign in light of Damasio's work, as well as that of Oliver Sacks and the Argentine...

'Meaning' in cinema is very complex, and the flood of theories that define it have, in certain ways, left cinematic meaning meaningless. Johannes Ehrat's analysis of meaning in cinema has convinced him that what is needed is greater philosophical reflection on the construction of meaning. In Cinema and Semiotic, he attempts to resurrect meaning by employing Charles S. Peirce's theories on semiotics to debate the major contemporary film theories that have diluted it.

Based on Peirce's Semiotic and Pragmatism, Ehrat offers a novel approach to cinematic meaning in three...

Grounded in the semiotic thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, America's greatest polymath, Howard A. Smith's Teaching Adolescents addresses topics in educational psychology from a semiotic or sign-based perspective rather than a behavioural one. In this educational psychology textbook, Smith's main argument is that teachers must rely on signs of all kinds to understand students and to survive as teachers. This book is unique in applying a single unifying framework throughout.

Among the many concepts that Smith discusses in Teaching Adolescents are the nature of the sign and its basis...

The more human knowledge increases, the more signs grow and, with this expansion, the more the boundaries of the science that studies signs also grows. In Semiotics Unbounded, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio explain the explosion of the sign network in the era of global communication and discuss the important theoretical responses offered by semiotics. Providing a much-needed introductory guide to the subject, Petrilli and Ponzio explore the ever-growing frontiers of semiotics through the thought of prominent sign scholars such as Charles Peirce, Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin,...

An extensive investigation of the forms and functions of the comic, this lively and engaging English critical edition will be welcomed by those interested in laughter, comedy, folklore, Russian literature, and specific authors such as Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, Rabelais, Moli?re, and Shakespeare. The direct, humorous, and provocative style of this work, which tackles the subject of humour with a vast array of vivid examples encountered on every page, will certainly appeal to the contemporary reader.

Vladimir Propp takes various forms of laughter in literature and real life and...

Covering major developments from post-war cybernetics and telegraphy to the Internet and our networked society, Remodelling Communication explores the critical literature from across disciplines and eras on the models used for studying communications and culture.

Proceeding model-by-model, Genosko provides detailed explanations of mathematical, semiotic, and reception theory's encoding/decoding models, as well as Baudrillard's critique of models and general models that bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Providing a dynamic, forward-looking reorientation...