Schools and circles have been a major force in twentieth-century intellectual movements. They fostered circulation of ideas within and between disciplines, thus altering the shape of intellectual inquiry. This volume offers a new perspective on theoretical schools in the humanities, both as generators of conceptual knowledge and as cultural phenomena. The structuralist, semiotic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical schools and circles have had a deep impact on various disciplines ranging from literary studies to philosophy, historiography, and sociology. The volume focuses on a set of loosely interrelated groups, with a strong literary, linguistic, and semiotic component, but extends to the fields of philosophy and history-the interdisciplinary conjunctions arising from a sense of conceptual kinship. It includes chapters on unstudied or less studied groups, such as Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics or the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics. The volume presents a significant supplement to the standard historical accounts of literary, critical, and related theory in the twentieth century. It enhances and complicates our understanding of the twentieth-century intellectual and academic history by showing schools and circles in the state of germination, dialogue, controversy, or decline, in their respective historical and institutional settings, while reaching simultaneously beyond those dense settings to the new cultural and ideological situations of the twenty-first century.

Schools and circles have been a major force in twentieth-century intellectual movements. They fostered circulation of ideas within and between disciplines, thus altering the shape of intellectual inquiry. This volume offers a new perspective on theoretical schools in the humanities, both as generators of conceptual knowledge and as cultural phenomena. The structuralist, semiotic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical schools and circles have had a deep impact on various disciplines ranging from literary studies to philosophy, historiography, and sociology. The volume focuses on a set of loosely interrelated groups, with a strong literary, linguistic, and semiotic component, but extends to the fields of philosophy and history-the interdisciplinary conjunctions arising from a sense of conceptual kinship. It includes chapters on unstudied or less studied groups, such as Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics or the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics. The volume presents a significant supplement to the standard historical accounts of literary, critical, and related theory in the twentieth century. It enhances and complicates our understanding of the twentieth-century intellectual and academic history by showing schools and circles in the state of germination, dialogue, controversy, or decline, in their respective historical and institutional settings, while reaching simultaneously beyond those dense settings to the new cultural and ideological situations of the twenty-first century.

The 'narrative turn' in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the 'medial turn' in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from widely studied, such as literature and film, to new, neglected, or non-standard ones, such as graphic novels, photography, television, musicals, computer games and advertising, they address some of the most fundamental questions raised by the medial turn in narratology: how can narrative meaning be created in media other than language; how do different types of signs collaborate with each other in so-called 'multi-modal works', and what new forms of narrativity are made possible by the emergence of digital media.

Culture and Explosion, now appearing in English for the very first time, is the final book written by the legendary semiotician Juri Lotman. Originally published in Russian in 1992, a year before Lotman's death, the volume puts forth a fundamental theory: the semiotics of culture. Proceeding from a model of communication, Lotman extends the work of the renowned Tartu-Moscow school that he founded, showing not only how culture can be observed and described, but also how it can be governed and guided. In fact, as Lotman demonstrates with copious examples, the modelling system of culture has an immeasurably strong influence on the way that humans experience "reality". As usual, Lotman's erudition is brought to bear on the theory of culture, and the book comprises a host of well-chosen illustrations from history, literature, art and right across the humanities. The book is of interest to students and researchers in semiotics, cultural/literary studies and Russian studies, as well as anyone with an interest in understanding contemporary intellectual life.

Culture and Explosion, now appearing in English for the very first time, is the final book written by the legendary semiotician Juri Lotman. Originally published in Russian in 1992, a year before Lotman's death, the volume puts forth a fundamental theory: the semiotics of culture. Proceeding from a model of communication, Lotman extends the work of the renowned Tartu-Moscow school that he founded, showing not only how culture can be observed and described, but also how it can be governed and guided. In fact, as Lotman demonstrates with copious examples, the modelling system of culture has an immeasurably strong influence on the way that humans experience "reality". As usual, Lotman's erudition is brought to bear on the theory of culture, and the book comprises a host of well-chosen illustrations from history, literature, art and right across the humanities. The book is of interest to students and researchers in semiotics, cultural/literary studies and Russian studies, as well as anyone with an interest in understanding contemporary intellectual life.

The variety in contemporary philosophical and aesthetic thinking as well as in scientific and experimental research on complexity has not yet been fully adopted by narratology. By integrating cutting-edge approaches, this volume takes a step toward filling this gap and establishing interdisciplinary narrative research on complexity. Narrative Complexity provides a framework for a more complex and nuanced study of narrative and explores the experience of narrative complexity in terms of cognitive processing, affect, and mind and body engagement. Bringing together leading international scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume combines analytical effort and conceptual insight in order to relate more effectively our theories of narrative representation and complexities of intelligent behavior. This collection engages important questions on how narrative complexity functions as an agent of cultural evolution, how our understanding of narrative complexity can be extended in light of new research in the social sciences and humanities, how interactive media produce new types of narrative complexity, and how the role of embodiment as a factor of narrative complexity acquires prominence in cognitive science and media studies. The contributors explore narrative complexity transmitted through various semiotic channels, embedded in multiple contexts, and experienced across different media, including film, comics, music, interactive apps, audiowalks, and ambient literature.