These essays define the new philosophical field of existential semiotics. Existential semiotics involves an "a priori" state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. There is a hermeneutic and phenomenological aspect to the work. Its sources are in Husserl, Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger. As a member of the Paris School of Semiotics (A.J. Greimas in particular), Tarasti is seeking less categorical, less Cartesian approaches. He sees semiotics in transition, shift, rupture and flux, something which is becoming rather than being. His theoretical ideas are illustratd with examples from high culture - painting, music and literature - as well as from current day media and popular culture, including landscapes, gastronomy, novels, Walt Disney, film advertising as narratives, and post-colonial practices. Signs are examined in their interdisciplinary as well as intertextual connections.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Part One: Philosophical Reflections
On the Paths of Existential Semiotics
Signs and Transcendence
Endo-/Exogenic Signs, Fields, and Worlds
Understanding, Misunderstandings, and Self-Understanding
Signs of Anxiety; or the Problem of Semiotic Subject
Part Two: In the Forest of Symbols
From Aesthetics to Ethics
The "Structural" and "Existential" Styles in 20th Century Arts
On the Authenticity and Inauthenticity of Art
Part Three: The Social and Cultural Field of Signs
On Post-colonial Semiosis
Semiotics of Landscapes
Poetics of Place
Walt Disney and Americanness
"...and you find the right one"
Senses, Values—and Media
About the Author :
Eero Tarasti holds the Chair of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. One of the world's leading semioticians, he is founder and President of the Semiotic Society of Finland, Director of the International Semiotics Institute at Imatra, and author of numerous articles and books, including A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Indiana University Press).
Review :
Tarasti's explanations, analyses and comments of sign processes in art and everyday life might seem amazing at first sight. He is not afraid of heavily speculative and heavily metaphysical thinking. . . . [he] wants to show us that there can be more involved in sign processes than pure conventionality, maybe even something that is beyond the grasp of the Semiotician.34 2004
(KODIKAS)
