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Landscapes generate meaning and impact on three major areas of scholarly interest: language and visual discourse, spatial practices and global capitalism.
Introducing Social Semiotics uses a wide variety of texts including photographs, adverts, magazine pages and film stills to explain how meaning is created through complex semiotic interactions. Practical exercises and examples as wide ranging as furniture arrangements in public places, advertising jingles, photojournalism and the rhythm of a rapper's speech provide readers with the knowledge and skills they need to be able to analyse and also produce successful multimodal texts and designs. The book traces the development of semiotic resources through particular channels such as the history of the Press and advertising; and explores how and why these resources change over time, for reasons such as advancing technology. Featuring a full glossary of terms, exercises, discussion points and suggestions for further reading, Introducing Social Semiotics makes concrete the complexities of meaning making and is essential reading for anyone interested in how communication works.
This comprehensive survey of semiotics examines its development from pre-Socratic philosophy to Peirce’s Sign Theory and beyond. In Introducing Semiotics, renowned philosopher and semiotician John Deely provides a conceptual overview of the field, covering its development across centuries of Western philosophical thought. It delineates the foundations of contemporary semiotics and concretely reveals just how integral and fundamental the semiotic point of view really is to Western culture. In particular, the book bridges the gap from St. Augustine in the fifth century to John Locke in the seventeenth. The appeal of semiotics lies in its apparent ability to establish a common framework for all disciplines, a framework rooted in the understanding of the sign as the universal means of communication. With its clarity of exposition and careful use of primary sources, Introducing Semiotics is an essential text for newcomers to the subject and an ideal textbook for semiotics courses.
This core textbook offers a concise, direct and easy-to-use introduction to how semiotics can be employed to understand culture. It adopts a practical and versatile approach to cultural analysis, beginning not with an abstract body of theory but with a number of examples of social sign use which are examined critically using basic semiotic terms and concepts to build up the reader's analytic vocabulary in a practical way. This book is designed to be read in several ways. First of all, it offers a structured approach to its subject with successive chapters reconsidering and building upon issues raised in earlier chapters. The layout of the text supports alternative pathways through the material, however. Written principally with the undergraduate student reader in mind, this is the essential research tool for students and lecturers. It is the ideal international starting-point for a very wide range of courses both in cultural and media studies and related subjects such as film studies, literature and sociology.
This comprehensive survey of semiotics examines its development from pre-Socratic philosophy to Peirce’s Sign Theory and beyond. In Introducing Semiotics, renowned philosopher and semiotician John Deely provides a conceptual overview of the field, covering its development across centuries of Western philosophical thought. It delineates the foundations of contemporary semiotics and concretely reveals just how integral and fundamental the semiotic point of view really is to Western culture. In particular, the book bridges the gap from St. Augustine in the fifth century to John Locke in the seventeenth. The appeal of semiotics lies in its apparent ability to establish a common framework for all disciplines, a framework rooted in the understanding of the sign as the universal means of communication. With its clarity of exposition and careful use of primary sources, Introducing Semiotics is an essential text for newcomers to the subject and an ideal textbook for semiotics courses.
"Introducing Semiotics" outlines the development of sign study from its classical precursors to contemporary post-structuralism. Through Paul Cobley's incisive text and Litza Jansz's brilliant illustrations, it identifies the key semioticians and their work and explains the simple concepts behind difficult terms. For anybody who wishes to know why signs are crucial to human existence and how we can begin to study systems of signification, this book is the place to start.
Signs in Use is an accessible introduction to the study of semiotics. All organisms, from bees to computer networks, create signs, communicate, and exchange information. The field of semiotics explores the ways in which we use these signs to make inferences about the nature of the world. Signs in Use cuts across different semiotic schools to introduce six basic concepts which present semiotics as a theory and a set of analytical tools: code, sign, discourse, action, text, and culture. Moving from the most simple to the most complex concept, the book gradually widens the semiotic perspective to show how and why semiotics works as it does. Each chapter covers a problem encountered in semiotics and explores the key concepts and relevant notions found in the various theories of semiotics. Chapters build gradually on knowledge gained, and can also be used as self-contained units for study when supported by the extensive glossary. The book is illustrated with numerous examples, from traffic systems to urban parks, and offers useful biographies of key twentieth-century semioticians.
This accessible introduction to multimodality illuminates the potential of multimodal research for understanding the ways in which people communicate. Readers will become familiar with the key concepts and methods in various domains while learning how to engage critically with the notion of multimodality. The book challenges widely held assumptions about language and presents the practical steps involved in setting up a multimodal study, including: formulating research questions collecting research materials assessing and developing methods of transcription considering the ethical dimensions of multimodal research. A self-study guide is also included, designed as an optional stand-alone resource or as the basis for a short course. With a wide range of examples, clear practical support and a glossary of terms, Introducing Multimodality is an ideal reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students in multimodality, semiotics, applied linguistics and media and communication studies. Online materials, including colour images and more links to relevant resources, are available on the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/jewitt and the Routledge Language and Communication Portal.
This book introduces relational thinking to political analysis. Instead of merely providing an overview of possible trajectories for articulating a relational political analysis, Peeter Selg and Andreas Ventsel put forth a concrete relational theory of the political, which has implications for research methodology, culminating in a concrete method they call political form analysis. In addition, they sketch out several applications of this theory, methodology and method. They call their approach “political semiotics” and argue that it is a fruitful way of conducting research on power, governance and democracy – the core dimensions of the political – in a manner that is envisioned in numerous discussions of the “relational turn” in the social sciences. It is the first monograph that attempts to outline an approach to the political that would be relational throughout, from its meta theoretical and theoretical premises through to its methodological implications, methods and empirical applications.
