Positioned within the field of linguistics and multisemiotic discourse analysis, the theme of this book is the multifaceted interaction between text and image in different discourse genres, and it offers critical views on how we talk and show our experience of the world around us.

Roland Barthes was one of the most widely influential thinkers of the 20th Century and his immensely popular and readable writings have covered topics ranging from wrestling to photography. The semiotic power of fashion and clothing were of perennial interest to Barthes and The Language of Fashion - now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series - collects some of his most important writings on these topics. Barthes' essays here range from the history of clothing to the cultural importance of Coco Chanel, from Hippy style in Morocco to the figure of the dandy, from colour in fashion to the power of jewellery. Barthes' acute analysis and constant questioning make this book an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the cultural power of fashion.

"Transnational Canadas" marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students.

Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today's economic climate, "Transnational Canadas" explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada's state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being.

An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, "Transnational Canadas" seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.

Many attack pop culture as a crude "sexual" and "celebrity-based" culture that is purportedly bringing about the end of moral values. Renowned semiotician Marcel Danesi adds his signature insight to the debate by delving deep into pop culture through a consideration of symbols. Danesi's treatment of letters, such as the X in "X-Rated," the "i" in "iPod," and other such symbols, reveals an ancient mythic structure that blends the sacred and profane dimensions of human psychic life. Danesi takes the reader on a remarkable exploration of the radical turns in American society, a society in which the search for pleasure and sexual expression often reign supreme. "X-Rated " is a fascinating trip through what gives pop culture its secret appeal.

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a "five-pound note" with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch.

Many vocabulary items that foreign language learners encounter involve figurative extensions of meaning. To understand figurative speech, learners often need to employ figurative thinking. This book examines figurative thinking, considers its contribution to language ability, and explores the implications for language teaching and learning.

Signs of War and Peace focuses on the role public display plays in the conflict in Northern Ireland. In doing so, it ranges freely over other times, places, and events that shed light on the social and political processes and dynamics involved in public display traditions, such as the Saint Patrick's Day parades in Boston, Massachusetts, and the popular spontaneous shrines to Lady Diana in London. The book is about the nature of public display, its relationships to class-based aesthetics, tradition, and popular style. It is also about contest, conflict, and civil war, and the ways the former are intimately intertwined with the latter, both in Northern Ireland and elsewhere throughout the world. The work is interdisciplinary, combining ethnographic, anthropological, folkloristic, and performance studies approaches. The manuscript benefits from large amount of field work in Ireland, and as a result contains both ethnographic data and revealing interviews with many people in Northern Ireland who have participated in the display events Santino seeks to analyze. The perspective that Santino offers helps to explain the intensity of the conflict as well as the origination, motivations, and justifications of bonfires, murals, commemorative displays, parades, etc. that symbolically articulate what he terms the 'dual master narratives' that underlie and in many ways help to articulate the parameters of that conflict.

In The Handicap Principle, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi offer a unifying theory that brilliantly explains many previously baffling aspects of animal signalling and holds up a mirror in which ordinary human behaviours take on surprising new significance.

The semiotics discipline - a hybrid of communication science and anthropology - accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the key principles and methods of applied semiotics, it introduces the basics of branding, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. Through practical exercises, examples, extended team projects, and evaluation criteria, this book guides students through the application of learning to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to tools for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, it includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies, as well as expert case studies that will enable readers to apply semiotics to consumer research.

Integrating strategic problem-solving, and emphasis on stories and the cultural context of meaning, this book introduces the theoretical stance of semiotic constructivism. Its main argument, illustrated in engaging cases, is that all experience is a construction of signs, and that symbolic forms such as language, myth, ritual and drama create and shape our realities, and provide useful tools for encouraging therapeutic change.

Die Erforschung von Sprache im oeffentlichen Raum (Linguistic Landscapes, LL) hat sich in den vergangen 20 Jahren als Teilgebiet der Soziolinguistik, der Semiotik und anderer Disziplinen fest etabliert. Der vorliegende Band gibt einen UEberblick zu zentralen Ansatzen der LL-Forschung mit einem Bezug zur deutschen Sprache. Die Beitrage stellen aktuelle Studien aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum, zu Deutsch als Minderheitensprache sowie aus Landern mit einer ausgepragten DaF-Tradition vor. Sie thematisieren sprachstrukturelle und soziolinguistische ebenso wie didaktische, methodische und technologische Aspekte. Damit tragt der Band zu einer Systematisierung der deutschsprachigen LL-Forschung bei, gibt Impulse fur internationale Diskussionen und benennt wichtige Desiderata.

The semiotics discipline - a hybrid of communication science and anthropology - accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the key principles and methods of applied semiotics, it introduces the basics of branding, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. Through practical exercises, examples, extended team projects, and evaluation criteria, this book guides students through the application of learning to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to tools for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, it includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies, as well as expert case studies that will enable readers to apply semiotics to consumer research.

"A comprehensive study on Barthes and photography . . . the most studious research on the topic."--Antoine Compagnon, Columbia University and the Sorbonne "Interesting and significant. . . . Important for scholars, students, and general readers interested in literature, art, photography, critical theory, and media studies."--Scott Nygren, University of Florida French theoretician Roland Barthes enjoyed a long and shifting relationship with photography, using it first as metaphor, moving on to explore its use in movies, film stills, political campaigns, and popular photographic essays, and finally confronting it anew with the death of his mother. Although Barthes' last book, and his only book-length study of photography, Camera Lucida, has enormously influenced study of visual images in the arts and humanities, this is the first examination in English of Barthes's work on the visual arts. Nancy Shawcross brings together and analyzes for the first time--in any language--all of Barthes's writings, both direct and indirect, about visual media in its many forms. Shawcross reads Camera Lucida against the whole of Barthes' work, an intertextual approach that reanimates his earlier writings in a way that a strictly chronological discussion would not. By focusing on the border between literature and photography, Shawcross combines theoretical and philosophical questions with the history and cultural contexts of photography. This meticulously researched book places Barthes's thought on photography in the context of his own developing ideas about semiology, tracking origins, rejections, and departures. It shows Barthes's affinities with and distinction from other theorists of photography such as Baudelaire and Benjamin and, finally, examines his thought in the context of postmodern discussions of photography that followed it. Nancy Shawcross teaches comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania and serves as curator of manuscripts in the Department of Special Collections there. She co-organized a 1994 international conference on Barthes at the university and has published articles and book chapters in the field of literary criticism.

This is a festscrift made to honour the great scholarly work of Professor Soren Brier The festschrift contains articles written by international scholars within academic fields such as: semiotics, library and information science, 2. order cybernetics, ethics in science, metaphysics. All these different yet related topics show the diversity and depth of Briers research.

Bogdan sets forth criteria and methods of a structural analysis of the pictorial language as a first step toward a more adequate understanding of the semiotic system of visual arts. A structural approach to this pictorial language is presented along with a discussion of an information-processing model applied to optical illusions and computer simulations, and treatment of specifically paradigmatic case studies. Bogdan also discusses the Funeral Monument of Targu Jiu by Constantin Brancusi, one of the most important innovators in modern art.

Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sell-out lectures.

Now, in Understanding Power, Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the past, present and future of the politics of power. In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions - published here for the first time - Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as US foreign and domestic policy, Understanding Power is definitive Chomsky.

Archives, monuments, celebrations:there are not merely the recollections of memory but also the foundations of history. Symbols, the third and final volume in Pierre Nora's monumental Realms of Memory, includes groundbreaking discussions of the emblems of France's past by some of the nation's most distinguished intellectuals. The seventeen essays in this book consider such diverse "sites" of memory as the figures of Joan D'Arc and Decartes, the national motto of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", the tricolor flag and the French language itself. Pierre Nora's closing essay on commemoration provides a culminating overview of the series. Offering a new approach on history, culture, French studies and the studies of symbols, Realms of Memory reveals how the myriad meanings we attach to places and events constitute our sense of history.

In global consumer culture, brands structure an economy of symbolic exchange that gives value to the meanings consumers attach to the brand name, logo, and product category. Brand meaning is not just a value added to the financial value of goods, but has material impact on financial markets themselves. Strong brands leverage consumer investments in the cultural myths, social networks, and ineffable experiences they associate with marketing signs and rituals. Creating Value: The Theory and Practice of Marketing Semiotic Research is a guide to managing these investments by managing the cultural codes that define value in a market or consumer segment. The book extends the discussion beyond the basics of semiotics to post-structural debates related to ethnographic performance, multicultural consumer identity, the digitalized consumer, and heterotopic experiences of consumer space. The book invites readers to challenge the current thinking on topics ranging from cultural branding and brand rhetoric to digital media management and service site design. It also emphasizes the role of product category codes and cultural trends in the production of perceived value. Creating Value explains theory in language that is accessible to academics and students, as well as research practitioners and marketers. By applying semiotics to the everyday world of the marketplace, the book makes sense of the semiotics discipline, which is often mystified by technical jargon and hair-splitting debate in the academic literature. The book also provides practitioners and professors with a practical guide to the methods used in semiotic research across the marketing mix.

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major pieces as well as works that have never been published in English. The collection brings Lotman into the orbit of contemporary concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and urban life. It is aimed at students from various disciplines and is augmented by an introduction and notes that elucidate the relevant contexts.

This text is designed to provide a basic introduction to semiotics and communication theory, with plenty of examples from, and applications to, popular culture. It aims to make accessible the technical and often abstruse subject matter of sign theory in practical ways, with illustrations in such areas as myth. storytelling, television, advertising, clothing, and architecture. Without overwhelming, this introduction allows students and interested general readers to get a comprehensive look at what semiotics and communication theory are all about. Messages, Signs, and Meanings can be used directly in introductory courses in semiotics, communications, media, or culture studies. Additionally, it can be used in courses dealing with cognate areas of investigation (psychology, mythology, education, literary studies, anthropology, linguistics) as a complementary or supplementary text. The text builds upon what readers already known intuitively about signs and then leads them to think critically about the world in which they live--a world saturated with images of all kinds that a basic knowledge of semiotics can help filter and deconstruct. The text also provides opportunities for readers to do "hands-on" semiotics through the exercises and questions for discussion that accompany each chapter. Biographical sketches of the major figures in the field are also included, as is a convenient glossary of technical terms. The overall plan of the book is to illustrate how message-making and meaning-making can be studied from the specific vantage point of the discipline of semiotics. This third edition also includes updated discussions of information technology throughout, focusing especially on howmeanings are now negotiated through such channels as websites. chat rooms, and instant messages.

Contrary to the usual image of the press as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in its search for truth, Edward Herman and Noam Chomskydepict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facetsof the news. They skillfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news. They reveal how issues are framed and topics chosen. What emerges from this pathbreaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media are, and how we can learn ro read them and see their funtion in a radically new way.

This book is about the representations - both visual and linguistic - which people give of their own places of origin. It examines the drawings of interviewees who were asked to draw their own place of origin on a white A3 sheet, using pencil or colour, according to their choice. If they were born in a place they did not remember because they moved in when they were very small, they could draw the place they did remember as the scenario of their early childhood. The drawings are examined from three different perspectives: semiotics, cognitive psychology and geography. The semiotic instruments are used to describe how each person reconstructs a complex image of his/her childhood place, and how they translate their own memories from one language to another, e.g. from drawing to verbal story, trying to approach what they want to express in the best possible way. The cognitive-psychological point of view helps clarify the emotional world of the interviewees and their motivations during the process of reconstruction and expression of their childhood experiences. The geographical conceptualizations concern a cultural level and provide insight into the cartographic models that inspire the maps people drew. One of the main findings was the influence from cultural codes as demonstrated in the fact that most of the US students interviewed drew their maps showing considerable cartographic expertise in comparison to their European counterparts.

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors-Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin-and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sorensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today.