This book explores the practical aspects of intersemiotic translation, examining how different signs and sign sets can be transposed into different kinds of semiotic forms of reference. Drawing on theories from translation studies, semiotics, philosophy and stylistics, the author seeks to understand what happens when texts are translated from one genre or modality to another, and makes use of examples ranging from written texts to advertising, images, music, painting, photography, and sculpture. She also analyses related topics such as the differences between Romance and Germanic languages, the difficulties that arise when attempts are made to translate figures of speech or elements of authorial style, and how this interdisciplinary field relates to traditional language-based translation. This book will be of interest to students, teachers, translators and researchers working in the fields of translation studies and multimodality in particular.

Victoria Welby (1837-1912) dedicated her research to the relationship between signs and values. She exchanged ideas with important exponents of the language and sign sciences, such as Charles S. Peirce and Charles S. Ogden. She examined themes she believed crucially important both in the use of signs and in reflection on signs. But Welby's research can also be understood in ideal dialogue with authors she could never have met in real life, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer, and Genevieve Vaughan.

Welby contends that signifying cannot be constrained to any one system, type of sign, language, field of discourse, or area of experience. On the contrary, it is ever more developed, enhanced, and rigorous, the more it develops across different fields, disciplines, and areas of experience. For example, to understand meaning, Welby evidences the advantage of translating it into another word even from the same language or resorting to metaphor to express what would otherwise be difficult to conceive.

Welby aims for full awareness of the expressive potential of signifying resources. Her reflections make an important contribution to problems connected with communication, expression, interpretation, translation, and creativity.

In Wordly Wise: The Semiotics of Discourse in Dante's Commedia, Raffaele De Benedictis proposes a new critical method in the study of the Divine Comedy and Dante's minor works. It systematically and comprehensively addresses the discursive aspect of Dante's works and focuses mainly on the reader, who, along with the author and the text, contributes to the making of discursive paths and discourse-generating functions through the act of reading. This work allows the reader to become acquainted with how meaning is generated and whether it is granted legitimacy in the text. Also, in a system of signification, sign function and sign production are not limited to the properties of the mind but are the result of working interactively with the properties of discourse, which provide directionality for the reader's enunciation(s) in action.

Ostentation of the Subject is a practice that is asserting itself ever more in today's world. Consequently, criticism by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists has been to little effect, considering that they are not immune to such practices themselves. The question of subjectivity concerns the close and the distant, the self and the other, the other from self and the other of self. It is thus connected to the question of the sign. It calls for a semiotic approach because the self is itself a sign; its very own relation with itself is a relation among signs. This book commits to developing a critique of subjectivity in terms of the "material" that the self is made of, that is, the material of signs.

Susan Petrilli highlights the scholarship of Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Mary Boole, Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, Thomas Szasz, and Victoria Welby. Included are American and European theories and theorists, evidencing the relationships interconnecting American, Italian, French, and German scholarship.

Petrilli covers topics from identity issues that are part of semiotic views, to the corporeal self as well as responsibility, reason, and freedom. Her book should be read by philosophers, semioticians, and other social scientists.

This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Although readers are likely familiar with otherness, interpretation, identity, embodiment, ecological crisis, and ethical responsibility for the biosphere--Petrilli forges new paths where other theorists have not tread. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires--creativity and imagination.

Petrilli presents a careful integration of divergent thinkers and diverse perspectives. While she abandons hope of attaining a final synthesis or an unqualifiedly comprehensive outlook, there remains a drive for coherence and detailed integration. The theory of identity being advocated in this book will provide the reader with an aid to appreciating the identity of the theorizing undertaken by Petrilli in her confrontation with an array of topics. Her theory differentiates itself from other offerings and, at the same time, is envisioned as a process of self-differentiation.

Petrilli's contribution is at once historical and theoretical. It is historical in its recovery of major figures of language; it is theoretical in its articulation of a comprehensive framework. She expertly combines analytic precision and moral passion, theoretical imagination and political commitment.

This brief, student-friendly introduction to the study of semiotics uses examples from 25 iconic locations in the United States. From Coney Island to Las Vegas, the World Trade Center to the Grand Canyon, Berger shows how semiotics offers a different lens in understanding locations taken for granted in American culture. He recasts Disneyland according to Freud, channels the Mall of America through Baudrilliard, and sees Mount Rushmore through the lens of Gramsci. A seasoned author of student texts, Berger offers an entertaining, non-threatening way to teach theory to undergraduates and that will fit ideally in classes on cultural studies, American studies, social theory, and tourism.

This brief, student-friendly introduction to the study of semiotics uses examples from 25 iconic locations in the United States. From Coney Island to Las Vegas, the World Trade Center to the Grand Canyon, Berger shows how semiotics offers a different lens in understanding locations taken for granted in American culture. He recasts Disneyland according to Freud, channels the Mall of America through Baudrilliard, and sees Mount Rushmore through the lens of Gramsci. A seasoned author of student texts, Berger offers an entertaining, non-threatening way to teach theory to undergraduates and that will fit ideally in classes on cultural studies, American studies, social theory, and tourism.

Boosting retail sales is more important than ever. Stand out in a global, digital marketplace, grow customer loyalty and evolve your brand by leveraging the power of semiotics online and in physical stores. Practical, accessible and based on 20 years of global marketing experience, Using Semiotics in Retail shows retailers of all sizes how to upgrade and empower their marketing, today and for the future. Discover step-by-step how to recognise and design for emerging consumer needs and create meaningful shopper experiences. Learn how to surprise and delight consumers, increase engagement and make shopping easier for everyone. It features case studies and examples from Unilever, Freshippo, H&M, Google, Toyota and many more. Using Semiotics in Retail shares game-changing marketing insights in categories such as FMCG, fashion, technology and entertainment, drawn from China, India, Mexico, the US and the UK. The book is supported by online resources that include templates and interactive exercises. Using Semiotics in Retail equips readers with a set of powerful tools which readers can use straight away to create engaging and successful retail marketing.

Media semiotics is a lucid investigation of the critical approach in contemporary media studies. Using examples such as Big Brother and Billy Elliot, Jonathan Bignell steps easily from basic concepts to more complex theories, while devoting chapters to specific media forms. New material in this second edition includes sections on men's style magazines, docusoaps and 'reality TV', digital interactive television, and mobile phone text messaging. This study begins by explaining the concept of the sign and the ideological roles of media in contemporary culture. The book then scrutinises advertisements, glossy magazines, daily newspapers, TV programmes, recent films and interactive media, with each chapter containing close analyses of particular examples. Key strands in critical theory which are allied to semiotics, such as ideology and psychoanalytic theory are explored. Media semiotics moves on to discuss the challenges to established semiotic methods posed by audience studies and postmodernism, and considers 'new media', including computer games, the Internet and the World Wide Web. -- .

"Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touched on inhis previous works, but he delves deeper into their complex nature... thiscollection can be read with pleasure by those unversed in semiotic theory." --Times Literary Supplement

Semiotics (the study of sign processes-'semiosis'-and sign systems) embraces linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies, as well as linking to anthropology, art, psychology, and biology. This new Routledge collection helps to make sense of the subject's huge interdisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature and brings together the best and most influential materials from 'the first phase', neo-classics from the institutionalization of semiotics in the 1960s, and contemporary works illustrating the ongoing development of semiotics and its widening applications (for example, in the natural sciences). Volume I ('Philosophy') collects pre-modern material showing the genesis of semiotics from Locke to Peirce, along with a range of work from the last thirty years. Volume II ('Linguistics') includes key work from recent developments in cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, while Volume III focuses on 'Text and Image'. Finally, Volume IV ('Logic, Biology, Psychology, Culture, and Anthropology') gathers the best offerings from other disciplines, and from emerging fields such as 'biosemiotics'. Fully indexed, and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this is an essential work destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital one-stop reference resource.

Dating back to antiquity, semiotics is both a "technique" and a "science" that aims to understand the nature of meaning. An academic discipline in its own right, semiotics uses signs, such as words and symbols, to think, communicate, reflect, transmit, and preserve knowledge. Since the initial publication of The Quest for Meaning in 2007, the world has changed dramatically with the advent of online culture, new technologies, and new ways of making signs and symbols. Updated to reflect these many changes, the second edition includes a comprehensive chapter on the use of semiotics in the Internet age. Written in a student-friendly style, featuring examples from everyday life, the book explains what semiotics is all about and why it is so important for gaining insights into our elusive and mysterious human nature.

Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious awareness of our inevitable mutual involvement in the network of life on this planet; and be responsibly involved in the destiny of the planet.

The author looks at semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and communication as developing sequentially rather than successively, more synchronically than diachronically. She discusses the contemporary phenomenon that people in today's society have witnessed and participated in, as part of the development of semiotics. Although there is a long history preceding semiotics, in a sense the field is, as a phenomenon, more "of our time" than of any time past. Its leading figures, whom Petrilli examines, belong to the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms. The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. In this respect, Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality.

Interrogating the relatively new field of cognitive semiotics, this book explores shared issues in cognitive science and semiotics. Building on research from recent decades, Per Aage Brandt investigates the potential of a cognitive semiotic approach to enhance our understanding of language, thought and semiosis in general. Introducing a critical, non-standard approach both to cognitive science and to semiotics, this book discusses the understanding of meaning and mind through four major dimensions; mental architecture, mental spaces, discourse coherence and eco-organization. Encompassing a rich variety of topics and debates, Cognitive Semiotics outlines several bridges between 'continental' and 'analytic' thinking in the study of semantics, pragmatics, discourse and the philosophy of language and mind.

Die Beitrage des Bandes befassen sich aus synchroner und diachroner Perspektive mit Reanalyse-Prozessen, die unter dem Schlagwort sprachliche Remotivierung zusammengefasst werden koennen. Dabei handelt es sich im weitesten Sinne formseitig um remotivierende Resegmentierungen und inhaltsseitig um semantische Remotivierungen. Das Buch bietet einen UEberblick uber Prozesse sprachlicher Remotivierung in verschiedenen Verwendungsdomanen, in denen sprachlichen Zeichen eine zentrale Funktion zukommt.

This book deals with the fundamental semantics of images of Europe, which consist of valences, mirror beliefs and affectivities. This is why it relaunches the importance of the European discourse in its symbolic dimension. As such, it explores the many images of Europe, or rather the many images through which European discourse is actually constituted in daily life, in search of their enunciative responsibility in today's world for determining the current "State of the Union". The identity of the European continent is based on a millenary tension between universalism and particularism: images of Europe have in fact been alternately inspired, over the centuries, by a model of homogeneity - Roman and Carolingian imperial disposition - on the one hand, and by a model of fragmentation - a Europe of city-states, municipalities, regions and small fatherlands - on the other. In the European Union, a political and economic organism, this issue has recently been amplified to the point that it has reentered public debate, and political parties that are only recognizable for being Europeanists or anti-Europeanists are now ubiquitous. In this regard, one major bone of contention is how to portray the quintessential aspects of the European territory, which are either interpreted as "thresholds" to be overcome in the name of a model of United Europe - "integral totality" - or are instead regarded as insurmountable obstacles for a Europe that is irreparably and perhaps, according to anti-Europeanists, fortunately fragmented - "partitive totality". Further, this is to be done without excluding the possibility of contradictory and complementary solutions to these binary visions. In this context the book analyzes various texts in order to obtain a more precise picture of the clash, reveal its semiotic forms, and by doing so, identify a way out of the crisis.

This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms' engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body's normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine.

On behalf of Professor Hugh Brady, Director and Senior Fellow, The Flag Research Center at the University of Texas School of Law, "Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer 2021) has been selected as the recipient of our Gherardi Davis Prize is presented for a significant contribution to vexillological research for the year 2021. This work was selected because of its breadth and depth in examining flags as meaningful transmitters of significant symbolic information concerning the origins, culture, self-image, and values of a society. We believe it represents a signal achievement in the study of flags that sets a new standard for research in the field." The Flag Research Center, founded in 1962, is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the human need to create and use symbols to express political, cultural, and social ideals through flags and flag-related material culture. The book deals with the identification of "identity" based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people's history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as "the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances". While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways. The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time. Advance Praise for Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative "In an epoch of fragmentation, isolation and resurgent nationalism, the flag is waved but often forgotten. The flag, its colors, narratives, shape and denotations go without saying. The red flag over China, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Tricolore are instantly recognisable and over determined, representing a people, a nation, a culture, languages, legacies, leaders. In this fabulous volume flags are revealed as concentrated, complex, chromatic assemblages of people, place and power in and through time. It is in bringing a multifocal awareness of the modes and meanings of flag and color in public representations that is particular strength. Editors Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek have gathered critical thinkers from the North and South, East and West, to help know the essential and central - yet often forgotten and not seen - work of flags and color in narratives of nation, conflict, struggle and law. A kaleidoscopic contribution to the burgeoning field of visual jurisprudence, this volume is essential to comprehending the ocular machinery through which power makes, and is seen to make, the world."Kieran Tranter, Chair of Law, Technology and Future, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia "This comprehensive volume of essays could not be arriving at a more opportune time. The combined forces of climate change, inequality, and pandemic are causing instability and painful recognitions of our collective uncertainties about nationhood and globalism. In the United States, where I am writing these few lines, our traditional red/white/blue flag has been collapsed into two colors: Red and Blue. While these colors have semiotically deep texts, the division of the country into these two colors began with television stations designing how to report the vote count in the 2000 presidential election year creating "red" and "blue" parties and states. The colors stuck and have become customary. We Americans are told all the time by pundits that we are a deeply divided nation, as proven by unsubtle colored maps. To a statistician, we are a Purple America, though the color is unequally distributed. White, the color of negotiation and peace is rarely to be found. To begin to approach understanding the problems flagged in my brief account requires the insight of multiple disciplines. That is what Wagner and Marusek, wonderful scholars in their own work, have assembled as editors -- a conversation among scholars at the forefront of thinking about how flags and colors represent those who claim them thus exemplifying how to resist simple explanations and pat answers. The topic is just too important."Christina Spiesel, Senior Research Scholar in Law, Yale Law School; Adjunct Professsor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law, USA "Visuals, such as symbols and images, in addition to conventional textual forms, seem to have a unique potential for the study of a collective identity of a community and its traditions, as well as its narratives, and at the same time, in the expression of one's ideas, impressions, and ideologies in a specific socio-political space. Visual analysis thus has become a well-established domain of investigations focusing on how various forms of text-external semiotic resources, such as culturally specific symbols, including patterns and colors, make it possible for scholars to account for and thus demystify discursive symbols in a wider social and public space. Flags, Identity, Memory: Critiquing the Public Narrative through Colors, as an international and interdisciplinary volume, is a unique attempt to demystify the thinking, values, assumptions and ideologies of specific nations and their communities by analyzing their choice of specific patterns and colors represented in a national flag. It offers a comprehensive and insightful range of studies of visual and hidden discursive processes to understand social narratives through patterns of colours in the choice of national flags and in turn to understand their semiotic, philosophical, and legal cultures and traditions. Wagner and Marusek provide an exclusive opportunity to reflect on the functions, roles, and limits of visual and discursive representations. This volume will be a uniquely resourceful addition to the study of semiotics of colours and flags, in particular, how nations and communities represent their relationship between ideology and pragmatism in the repository of identity, knowledge and history."Vijay K Bhatia, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Full Professor, Hong Kong "In all societies, colors play a critical function in the realm of symbolism. Nation societies perceive great significance in the colors of flags and national emblems. Colors constitute, in other words, sign systems of national identity. The relation of color codes and their relation to concepts of nationhood and its related narratives is the theme of this marvelous and eye-opening collection of studies. Flags are mini-texts on the inherent values and core concepts that a nation espouses and for this reason the colors that they bear can be read at many levels, from the purely representational to the inherently cultural. Written by experts in various fields this interdisciplinary anthology will be of interest to anyone in the humanities, social sciences, jurisprudence, narratology, political science, and semiotics. It will show how a seemingly decorative aspect of nationhood-the colors on flags-tells a much deeper story about the human condition."Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto, Full Professor of Anthropology, Canada

"This little gem offers the reader an overview of the various practices that form part of the ever increasing field of audiovisual translation (AVT) and makes brave inroads into the less glamorous but definitely needed areas of theory and research. Covering a wide range of topics in research in AVT, and admittedly questioning "whether a universal methodology for audiovisual translation research is feasible", this volume theorises about the nature of AVT, helps to frame some of the current trends, and points to potentially new research avenues. The style is reader friendly and to the point; a most welcome addition to translation studies." Jorge Diaz Cintas, University College London

Signs and symbols represent abstract ideas and concrete objects, providingn a sense of number, danger, value, distances in time and space, and even love. Over time, these marks and gestures have multiplied into an immernse and complex network of images, pictures and emblems - pictographs and logographs, maps and charts, letterforms, colours and patterns. How does a sign represent something other than itself? How do we come to understand the maning of a written symbol? What happens when a sign crosses international borders of language and culture? Can clothes constitute a sign? Can colours? Can sounds? This work takes the reader on a journey of discovery through the world of symbols.

This book traces the origins and evolution of cybersemiotics, beginning with the integration of semiotics into the theoretical framework of cybernetics and information theory. The book opens with chapters that situate the roots of cybersemiotics in Peircean semiotics, describe the advent of the Information Age and cybernetics, and lay out the proposition that notions of system, communication, self-reference, information, meaning, form, autopoiesis, and self-control are of equal topical interest to semiotics and systems theory. Subsequent chapters introduce a cybersemiotic viewpoint on the capacity of arts and other practices for knowing. This suggests pathways for developing Practice as Research and practice-led research, and prompts the reader to view this new configuration in cybersemiotic terms. Other contributors discuss cultural and perceptual shifts that lead to interaction with hybrid environments such as Alexa. The relationship of storytelling and cybersemiotics is covered at chapter length, and another chapter describes an individual-collectivity dialectics, in which the latter (Commind) constrains the former (interactants), but the former fuels the latter. The concluding chapter begins with the observation that digital technologies have infiltrated every corner of the metropolis - homes, workplaces, and places of leisure - to the extent that cities and bodies have transformed into interconnected interfaces. The book challenges the reader to participate in a broader discussion of the potential, limitations, alternatives, and criticisms of cybersemiotics.

This book addresses translingual identities through an innovative multimodal analysis of the language learning histories of a class of advanced learners of English in Japan who grew up between two or more languages. The author explores both the translingual experiences of those in the classroom and how they use language and gesture when describing their experiences to each other. This approach uses three perspectives: it looks at the worlds and identities the interviewees construct for themselves; at their interpersonal communication; and at the way they frame their experience. Finally, it offers some lessons based on the observations of the class which reveal the values they share and the key to their success as language learners. It will appeal to applied linguistic and educational researchers, particularly those with an interest in narrative approaches to exploring educational contexts, as well as language educators and policy makers interested in gaining a learner perspective on language learning.

This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.

The book is an in-depth presentation of the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has four parts: a historical introduction, the analysis of langue, narrative theory and communication theory. Part I briefly presents all the semiotic schools and their main points of reference. Although this material is accessible in many other Anglophone publications, the presentation is marked by specific choices aiming to display similarities and differences. The analysis of langue in Part II is also available in Anglophone bibliography, but the book presents Saussurean theory according to a new theoretical rationale and enriched with later developments. In addition, it is orientated so as to offer the foundation for the part that follows. Part III is a presentation of Greimasian narrative theory, well documented in Francophone bibliography but poorly represented in Anglophone publications. The presentation extends the theory in both a qualitative and a new quantitative direction, and includes a great number of examples and two extended textual analyses to help the reader understand and apply it. Part IV, communication theory, combines an extension of Greimasian sociosemiotics with other schools of thought. This original theoretical section discusses fourteen consecutive communication models, the synthesis of which results in a holistic, social semiotic theory of communication.

This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making enterprise. For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, "nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature" (Timo Maran); biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model of nature naturing. Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi's Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis as well as from Timo Maran's work on "modeling the environment in literature," Edwina Taborsky's writing on Peircean semiosis, and, of course, Jesper Hoffmeyer's formative work in biosemiotics are among the most important organizing elements for this volume.