Category: Authors

Nicoleta Popa Blanariu analyzes several idiomatic expressions from Romanian, French and English, and proposes some hypotheses on their origins in archaic mythical structures of the imaginary: firstly, dualistic myths about the brotherhood between the Trickster (as “Second Demiurge”) and “good God”, universally spread in ancestral traditions of many people; and secondly, myths of chthonian motherhood, occurring, in various forms, in almost all cultures.

This paper provides arguments for and against M.Lotman’s (2002) contention that Y.Lotman’s seminal concept of semiosphere is of post-modernist (post-structuralist; Posner 2011) orientation. A comparative reading of the definitional components of the semiosphere, their hierarchical relationship and their interactions is undertaken against the two principal axes of space and subjectivity in the light of Kantian transcendental idealism, as inaugural and authoritative figure of modernity, the Foucauldian discursive turn and the Deleuzian (post) radical empiricism (sic), as representative authors of the highly versatile post-modern vernacular. This comparative reading aims at highlighting not only similarities and differences between the Lotmanian conceptualization of the semiosphere and the concerned modernist and post-modernist authors, but the construct’s operational relevance in a post-metanarratives cultural predicament that has been coupled with the so-called spatial turn in cultural studies (Hess-Luttich 2012).

Using Welby’s work as a pretext, the text I am now proposing – with its references not only to the work of a woman from the Victorian era, more than ever topical today, but also to women from the contemporary world – is fundamentally a critique, in a semioethical key, of human relations and their current organization into the socio-economic form generally known as globalization. Under this aspect, my main focus in this paper is on a specific characteristic of today’s globalized world, that is, the logic of “identity,” therefore of “difference” and the central role they carry out in interpersonal relations, in society at large. My allusion here is to identity understood as closed identity, and to difference based on the logic of identity thus described, therefore “identity-difference”. In the first place, identity concerns this world itself, mainstream values and dominant socio-economic practice in a globalized world, which are oriented by the logic of identity.

A case will be made for the indispensability of embodied experience as a foundation for Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic, especially given the place of semiosis in signification. Lakoff and Johnson’s model of space and time, from dependence on physical, embodied experience, to more analogous based concepts in the mental world, is employed as a framework for a discussion of the primacy of Secondness in Peirce’s model of reasoning.

Le théâtre d’Eugène Ionesco fait l’objet d’un paradoxe: son «avant-gardisme» spectaculaire se nourrit d’une vision essentiellement classique. Plus précisément, Ionesco envisage des «archétypes oubliés», et cherche à les «renouveler» sous l’aspect de l’ expression dramatique, tel qu’il dit lui-même.