In addition to general submissions, the journal invites papers focused on three continuing themes – creative arts and intermediality, semio linguistics, and structuralism today. 

Submissions on these themes can be made at any time, and will be published individually in a general issue. When there is an aggregate number they will be collected into a special issue online and it is planned in print. The themes are continuing. Over time there can be more than one special edition or issue on each.

Send submissions to: southernsemioticreview@gmail.com.

Abstracts can be sent prior to the full paper. 

 

Creative Arts and Intermediality

The subject matter of this theme is broad – it invites selection from a plethora of works from literary, visual arts, music and performing arts fields. There is the opportunity to follow on and extend rich traditions and methodologies of semiotic study, that have included artistic works and practices, and to use artistic works as rich case materials for application of key pragmatic, structural, kinesic, communicative, aesthetic or phenomenological perspectives. The opportunity is further enriched by possible inclusion of the creative process, in addition to the published or produced work. 

There is the wider opportunity to attend to intermedial and multiform processes. Artistic works frequently feature layers of composition between different artforms, and also address the transposition and transformation of creative work from one format or signifying field to another. The mediated adoption of literary works into film has been going on for the past century and has extended to retelling of classical myths in film and games, cartoon books, translations, child editions, and theatricalisation of written stories. Poetry is written about exhibited paintings. The list is as long as the phenomenon and concept of creative works is broad. What extension of the semiotic project and its concepts and methods are involved in intermedial and multiform study, and what use of key authors is possible? What does it mean for one work to be “inspired” by another? What is the nature of adaptation? What is the status of the “literary” object? Does intermediality inevitably relate to multiform expression, where one work embodies expression of narrative or other features in several simultaneous artforms. transmediality, or is transmediality at the core of creative and cultural processes. The notions of intermediality and multiform can extend to non verbal forms – either accompanying or illustrating verbal texts, or acting as the source of verbal expression. The relationship between speech, and written and non forms, can also be studied. 

Semiolinguistics

Semiotics is a study of the systemic or structured nature of language, and its task of text analysis overlaps and complements that of linguistics and various traditional studies of syntax and grammar. There seems to be room for inquiry about how the two pursuits – semiotics and linguistics – relate, and what distinct contribution the systemic study of signs can bring to detailed text analysis. Without detailed methodology there is a danger that semiotics remain overly theoretical or generalised in its use of text to support social and cultural analysis. There have been a number of substantial papers and books written on the subject of semiotic grammar – this call for papers is an attempt to foreground what can be seen as an essential and often overlooked concern of the semiotic project.  There is an opportunity to explore micro text structure, of conversation, utterances and sentences, and compound and expanded text, and indexical and semantic features. Theoretical inquiry about the origins of language, language and phenomenology, and verbal and non verbal expression, are welcome.

Structuralism Today

This call is for papers that present a theoretically refreshed and timely application of the structural or semiological tradition. The burgeoning of localised, performatively rich semiotical functional studies, combined with post structural critique, has resulted in classical semiological studies losing significant favour, or ceasing to have depth in theory or research application. 

Charles Sanders Peirce has become a seminal figure in place of de Saussure, while Lévi-Strauss is often under-appreciated. Yet the elegance of structural analysis, so formidably demonstrated by Lévi-Strauss, can continue to have a necessary and complementary role alongside prevalent contemporary semiotics and critical discourse studies. Our interest is in flexible, diverse understandings of structure that can explain origins in human history and culture while embracing the kind of nuanced, informal thinking that Peirce and Deleuze invite. 

There is also scope to address, even rediscover, a wider range of authors, such as Kristeva and Greimas. Re-appraisal of Lévi-Strauss is welcome. Twentieth century theory might appear abstract, yet its development occurred in the context of major wars and international affairs. Lévi-Strauss was a Marxist, and a consultant to the UN. Greimas worked in invidious and intractable circumstances in Eastern Europe – consider, did WW2 feed into his exposition of oppositional structures?

A refreshed theory can be applied to case studies from history and anthropology, and fully theoretical papers are also possible.Theoretical questions include the origins and development of structure; the relationship between structural and non-structural accounts of language; the nature of patterns.

Consider the following: can structuralism offer valuable tools for perception, even recommendation, for conundrums facing the world today? For example, practices in resources, governance, migration and population studies, post-colonialism and the Global South, and climate change are all areas of potential interest. One may look at case studies that explore how structural theory provides tools for contemporary application in fields such as literature, mythology and the arts, culture, politics, anthropology, discourse, geopolitics, and war and peace. 

Papers should address the status and concepts of structuralism, doing more than reiterating simplified accounts. Papers that provides historical and non-idealised accounts of the origin and development of structure are especially welcome. 

Finally, the sense of structure can extend, as its does in work of Chomsky, to cognitive, logical and mathematical fields. Mathematics was a foundation field for Peirce’s semiotic study. What can we say today about patterns and structures from mathematical perspectives, and what does a semiotic philosophy of mathematics look like, and how is semiotic theory and methodology referenced to mathematics?