New Publication: Signs & Media, Spring Issue 2019

We are glad to announce that New issue of Signs & Media (Spring 2019, Vol. 18) has been published recently. You are welcome to download and circulate the PDF version from our website: http://www.semiotics.net.cn/isms

Editor’s note

Semiotics is often regarded as a useful and impressive methodology, as the complicated semiotic systems in human culture provide abundant possibilities for researchers to interpret. However, this variety of possibilities is likely to lead many researchers to ignore the following fundamental problem: how does semiotics deal with philosophical issues? The “Philosophical Semiotics” section presented in this issue is a response to this problem. Wu Xiaoming elucidates the ethical and semiotic issues involved in Emmanuel Levinas’ theory of the other, and Hu Yirong probes the humanism of the visual perspective. Zhang Cheng discusses the film image based on the phenomenology of semiotics. These reflections, returning to the very nature of the human being itself, explore the relationship between signs and the category of experience.

The complex and delicate forms of meaning, literature and art have always been the foci of our journal. In the “Semiotics and the Theory of Literary and Art” section, Zeng Jun explores signs of temporality in literary works, and Xiao Shuang discusses temporality in pictorial media. Peng Jia discusses aesthetics from the perspective of biological semiotics, while Zhou Haitian and Gao Yan extend concrete works to the world of meaning and the cognitive process behind it.

The “General Narratology” section expands the study of narrative structure. In this section, Brian Richardson”s theory of unnatural narrative is presented in an interview. He Li discusses the pictorial narrative of traditional New Year pictures, and Ling Yu discusses the narrative issues of the possible worlds in the cyber era. Furthermore, Yang Shaoliang considers narrative focus from the viewpoint of psychological narratology.

The “Theory and Application” section includes brilliant expositions of widely considered research objects, such as the semiotic self, symbolic rhetoric, the co-text and semiotic consumption. In addition, in accordance with the practice of the spring issue, we provide the 2018 annual report on the development of Chinese semiotic studies, recording the important works and developments in the field over the past year for your reference.

Contents

Philosophical Semiotics

I Make of myself as a Sign Given to the Other: Ethics and Sign in Levinasian Philosophy

Wu Xiaoming

On Perspective: Its Natural Law and Human Experience

Hu Yirong & Yang Dengxiang

From Co-occurrence to Repetition: On Generativity of the Film Image from the Perspective of semiotic phenomenology

Zhang Cheng

Semiotics and the Theory of Literary and Art

The Narrativity of Temporal Signs: Towards a Semio-narratological Approach

Zeng Jun

Revisiting the Biological Foundations of Art: From the Relation between Sense of Beauty and Semiotic Ability

Peng Jia

Visual Culture and Mirror Cognition: A Case Study of Nothing in the Mirror

Gao Yan

The Priority of Meaning and the Basis of Sign Construction: A Study of Folding of Beijing and The Three-body Problem

Zhou Haitian

Temporality in Pictorial Narrative

Xiao Shuang

General Narratology

The Unnatural and Unnatural Narrative Theory: An Interview with Professor Brian Richardson

Wang Changcai

Index and its Pictorial Representations in Traditional Woodcut New Year Pictures: Taking The Legend of White Snake as an Example

He Li

Possible Worlds Narrative in Cyber Time

Ling Yu

On the Concept of Focalisation in Psychonarratology

Yang Shaoliang

Theory and Application

Fashion Culture in the Late Qing Dynasty and Modern Cultural Industries in China: From the Perspective of Symbolic Consumption

Han Han

A Study of “Wen, or Pattern, is a Great Power Indeed” from the Perspective of the Co-text

Li Weihua

A Semiotic Analysis of Evolution of the Four Tropes of Music Talent Show in China

Xie Yangliu

On Cultural Symptoms Behind “Time Travel”: The Semiotic Self in Contemporary Time Travel Works of China

Yun Yan

Report and Book Review

2018 Annual Report of Chinese Semiotic Studies

Zhu Haoyun

Meaning Enlightening the world: A Review of Susan Petrilli’s Victoria Welby and Significs: The Birth of Semiotics

Hu Guangjin

The Expansion of Semiotic Fields: A Review of Svend Erik Larsen and JØrgen Dines Johansen’s Signs in Use: An Introduction to Semiotics

Liu Nan