Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of Russian Language and Literature
- Code
- BMI-ENGSEMIO-101
- Title
- Introduction to Semiotics (The History and Theory of Semiotics) II.
- Usual semester
- Spring
- Published semester
- 2025/26/2
- ECTS
- 5
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- A) Knowledge - by completing the course, the students know the major schools and approaches in contemporary semiotics - know the most important disciplinary fields of application of semiotic studies - are aware of the topical problems concerning theories and application of contemporary semiotic research - are aware of the institutional background of contemporary semiotic studies, as well as the most important publications and academic fora of the field B) Skills - capacity to identify and analyze semiotic problems implied by the disciplinary problems of other academic fields - ability of critical thinking about the topical problems in semiotic research - ability to contextualize discourse over semiotic problems with respect to recent academic research and contemporary institutional background C) Attitude - strong professional academic and disciplinary identity - synthesis of theoretical analytic and practical problem-oriented thinking - awareness of the insitutional and social context of semiotic problems and research D) Autonomy/responsibility - readyness to form independent opinion on practices of signification and on theories describing them - awareness of responsibility with respect to semiotic research in academia and in society - ablity to collect research material, use and cite data and sources of literature, as well as to prepare and publish new research in accordance with the ethical principals of academia
- Course content
- Throughout the course the most important theoretical approaches and fields of application of contemporary semiotics will be discussed. Topics: - history of transition from structuralis to post-structuralis approaches - semiotics and linguistic-mental representation: cognitive semiotics - semiotics and narrative meaning-making: narrative semiotics - text, culture, intertextuality: semiotics of literature - semiotic resources and intermediality: semiotics of media and society - semiotics and the biosphere: biosemiotics - semiosphere and cultural semiotics
- Assessment method
- Five-level oral exam or written essay.
- Bibliography
- Barthes, Roland, „Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”, New Literary History, 6/2, On Narrative and Narratives, (Winter, 1975), pp. 237-272. Budniakiewicz, Therese, Fundamentals of Story Logic Introduction to Greimassian Semiotics, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1992. Culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs – Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Cornell University Press, 2002. Eco, Umberto, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana University Press, 1986. Elleström, Lars, The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations, In: Elleström, Lars (ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010. Greimas, A. J., On Meaning – Selected Writing in Semiotic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Greimas, A. J., Maupassant – The Semiotics of Text, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1988. Herman, David – Phelan, James – Rabinowitz, Peter J. – Richardson, Bryan – Warhol, Robyn, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Ohio State University Press, 2012. Johansen, Jørgen Dines. Structuralism and/or the Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature. In: Redifining Literary Semiotics. Edited by Harri Veivo, Christina Ljungberg and Jørgen Dines Johansen, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 12–32. Lotman, Jurij M.; Ivanov, Vyacheslav V; Pjatigorskij, Aleksandr M.; Toporov, Vladimirj N.; Uspenskij, Boris A. Theses on the semiotic study of cultures (as applied to slavic texts). Tartu Semiotics Library. Tartu, 2013, 53–77. Lotman, Juri, Culture and Explosion, De Gruyter, 2009. Pelkey, Jamin, The Semiotics of X – Chiasmus, Cognition, and Extreme Body Memory, Bloomsbury, 2017. Sebeok, Thomas A., Signs – An Introduction to Semiotics, University of Toronto Press, 2001. Torop, Peeter. Cultural Semiotics In: The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture. Ed. by Farzad Sharifian. London and New York, 2015. 170–180. Uexküll, Jakob von, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Van Leeuwen, Theo, Introducing Social Semiotics – An Introductory Textbook, Routledge, 2004.