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DOI.ORG/10.33234/SSR.20.8
Editorial Issue 20
Despite their wide differences in subject matter and methodology, the papers in this Issue (20) of Southern Semiotic Review share a theoretical proclivity to understand the core nature of signs and the semiotic project, especially as it expands and moves beyond the boundaries of linguistics. We should never forget that the European founder of semiology, De Saussure, engaged in an elaborate linguistic exercise. This was not the case with his American forebear, Charles Peirce, and it was left to Deleuze, using film for case study and inspired by Peirce, to make a robust argument for signs understood as non linguistic by nature. Papers take off, where Deleuze started, in inquiry into a spectrum of examples – drawings, mirrors, media – while also remaining faithful to literature and orality. Is semiotics up to the task it has conceptually given itself – can it provide a toolkit of terms, perspectives and working concepts to rival the intricacies of linguistics – always remembering that there is no universal linguistic theory or approach, anymore than there is, at least for now, no consensual semiotic perspective or tradition.
