Monthly Archives: April 2016

Begins 3:59pm It is difficult to detect a speakers world vision, Eco claims, perhaps explaining why ideological arguments may be considered “an extra-semiotic residue”.  But ideology “is an organized world-vision which must be subjected to a semiotic analysis.” (p 289) … Continue reading →

Begins 2:43pm Restarted 2:59 pm [SS because the first beautiful batch of words was lost to a cyber-squid.  Can’t think of anything else to call the sudden jerky loss of Internet contact followed by disappearance of my work!] Eco argues … Continue reading →

Begins: 5:57pm Eco shows a representative case of ‘substitution of the instrumental cause by the effect’ in a discussion of Virgil’s poem the Aeneid (quoted on p 281). He then gives an exemplary use of a ‘semiotic enclave’ while illustrating … Continue reading →

Begins 3:59 According to Eco, the labor performed to overcode and to switch codes is ‘registered’ under the heading rhetoric.  Rhetorical labor must form part of a theory of sign-production because it raises questions about: How traditional rhetorical categories can … Continue reading →

Begins 6:05 pm [OS Did the walk help?] [SS We may have climbed to the top of the mountain, but the mountainous weight remains on me.] As Eco explains the detection of idiolects is difficult because it can hide behind/within … Continue reading →

Begins: 3:03pm In the last line of the last section on page 270 of Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics, he states that a work of art is “radically impermeable to all semiotic approach”. (p 270) But then opens the next … Continue reading →

Begins: 1:21pm As Eco points out, aesthetic texts produce overcoding on the expression and content planes.  The expression continuum has a direct effect on the content continuum such that an increase in the organisation of the former leads to an … Continue reading →

Begins 1:35pm “It is dangerous to establish a theoretical distinction between…the intellectual and the emotional use of language.” (p 268)  This warning by Hjelmslev in 1928 is confirmed, Eco asserts, by studies in the Soviet Union on levels of poetry … Continue reading →

Begins 6:49pm Aesthetic texts are ambiguous and self-focusing. (Eco p 262)  Ambiguity is defined semiotically “as a mode of violating the rules of the code.” (p 262).  Although this disruption of the codes may produce anything from nonsensical texts to … Continue reading →

Begins 4:18pm Smiles, perfumes and symphonies are examples Eco uses to illustrate the intertwined nature of modes of sign production.  Paintings are also complex and multi-faceted but they are texts not signs.  They involve many types of activities “practically covering … Continue reading →