Preface to Fifth Edition to Signs and Meaning in the Cinema

Semiotic Crossroads, 1995

2017

Whereas Mario de Carvalho, in the children/juvenile story O homem que engoliu a lua-The Man Who Swallowed the Moon-uses the intersemiotic translation (Plaza, 1982) when retelling the same tale, formerly published as O tombo da lua (Casos do Beco das Sardinheiras)-The Fall of the Moon (Cases from Sardinheiras Alley), which was intended for adult audience, we sought, in the semiotic considerations about instances of communication, to discuss the resources used in the former and later versions of the text, in the composition of the presentation context. We sought to create an interpretative framework of distinct semiosis – practiced between the verbal and the nonverbal – in order to describe the processes of narrative present in both texts. Looking at O tombo da lua-The Fall of The Moon and O homem que engoliu a lua-The Man Who Swallowed the Moon, created for different instances of communication (Geraldi, 1996), the study conducted a survey of icons and indexes which combine themselves in the creation of the narrative, apparently aiming to involve/conduct the audience during the development of the motif, through the signal instruments available in each one of the-verbal and nonverbal-systems used in the creation of the two texts. Contemplating the signs through the lens of Peircean semiotics, we outlined an analytical framework to compare the schemes implemented in building different presentation contexts: a) adult reading, complicated by the experiences of the interlocutors/readers, which are almost always protected from dreaming; b) children or juvenile reading, uncomplicated by the availability to new experiences, usually full of dreams and fantasies, opened for the unusual. The 21st century calls for the preparation and development of proficient readers. The Internet boom has promoted new ways to read, and readers must have tools and skills which enable them to face multiple texts with reliability. That means, in general, there is no more room for a naive reader (Eco, 1995). The semantic readers-who suffice themselves with the meaning of the words in the dictionary-would nowadays be the ones with more limited reading conditions, because the contemporary texts-especially the ones on the Internet-gather more than one code, more than one language, which are associated for the creation of a text with dynamic characteristics, to capture and keep the attention of the reader, besides provoking reflection, discussions; or at least establishing a healthy imbalance that leads the reader to think. Eco (1995: 11-12) presents a distinction between semantic readers and semiotic readers. The first ones, guided by the data on the surface of the text, would fill it of shallow meaning, while the semiotic readers would seek the structural reasons for text to produce such semantic interpretations, leading the reader to raise a central semiotic concern: why does it mean what it means and not something else? In accordance with Eco, we believe texts can be read in a superficial way, without any major political or ideological commitment, readers would suffice themselves with meanings found in a dictionary and also with the aid of some common sense. However, the commitment to the training and development of proficient readers, lead us to seek the semiotic-or critical-readers, since they will be

2007

Semiotics originates mainly in the work of two people, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Charles Peirce. Their ideas are quite closely related, but exhibit some differences. [ ... ] Saussure showed that language is made up of signs (like words) which communicate meanings, and he expected that all kinds of other things which communicate meanings could potentially be studied in the same way as linguistic signs, using the same methods of analysis. Semiotics or semiology, then, is the study of signs in society, and while the study of linguistic signs is one branch of it, it encompasses every use of a system where something (the sign) carries a meaning for someone. [ ... ] Since language is the most fundamental and pervasive medium for human communication, semiotics takes the way that language works as the model for all other media of communication, all other sign systems. [ ... ]

S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 2011

The title of this collection of essays, “Sign of the Times”, has a distinctly 1980s feel to it. Not only because of the eponymous Prince song that captured the bleak situation at the end of 1980s, but also because the reference to signs and semiotics seems about as cutting-edge today as psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic criticism, would appear to be… In those now far-away 1980s, both semiotics and psychoanalysis were still considered pilot sciences for the humanities in France and everywhere else French Theory reigned. Freud and Lacan were considered essential reading for scholars throughout the humanities: as Google’s Ngram viewer neatly demonstrates, the absolute peak of Freud citations in English books can be found between 1980 and 2000.2 However, already in his inaugural Leçon at Collège de France in 1977, Roland Barthes warned his readers that it would be unwise to hedge one’s bets on psychoanalysis in the stock market of theories. This advice seems even more sound thirty years later.

Disputatio, 2010

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2010

Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2008

In 2006 a team led by Prof. Martin Barker at Aberystwyth University was commissioned by the British Board of Film Classification to study audience responses to five films that the board had recently struggled classify, due to their depictions of sexual violence. This article (written by the project’s Research Assistant) draws on materials generated in relation to two of the films: Irreversible and A Ma Soeur! It argues that analysis of the patterns of narration that viewers employed in their written and spoken accounts of the films helped to make visible the dominant fields of meaning for those who embraced and refused the films. In particular, it will contrast the different structural role of the director in viewer strategies for negotiating and managing two issues of common concern in relation to screened sexual violence: narrative ambiguity and overwhelming affective power.

2005

The Pursuit of Signs 'Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know where literary theory was at, I'd say "semiotics", and Culler's Pursuit of Signs was the best way to see the links. Today? Same answer. Overview, criticism, problems and solutions: Culler offers them all in each chapter, on key topics and questions of the humanities. The book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then. Except that, with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis.