Jurij Lotman

Il saggio affronta il tema dell'autobiografia (o meglio della biografia personale) confrontando due libri, ma soprattutto il diverso atteggiamento intellettuale di due maestri della semiotica del Novecento come Roland Barthes e Jurij M. Lotman. Se

Рец. на: Ю. М. Лотман – Б.А. Успенский: Переписка 1964 – 1993. Составление, подготовка текста и комментарии О.Я. Кельберт и М.В. Трунина. Под общей редакцией Б.А. Успенского. Таллинн: Издательство ТЛУ, 2016 (Biblioteca LOTМANIANA). Опубл. по-эстонски: Keel ja kirjandus. 2017, #2.

The bibliography provides a list of all known English-language publications by Juri M. Lotman (including in co-authorship and reprints), in chronological order, described de visu. The first English translation of J. Lotman’s work appeared in 1973, altogether there is 109 entries in the list. The bibliography demonstrates that in the 1970s and 1980s, most of the translations were published in the context of slavistics, whereas after 2000 Lotman’s work starts to appear in the anthologies of general semiotics.

From the mid-1980s, the textual paradigm ignited a representational approach toward landscape within human geography. In this context, human geographers largely used the metaphor of landscape as text. Due to a rigid concept of text, this research assumed that landscapes could manifest selective worldviews and dominant discourses of power. Subsequently, human geographers refashioned the notion of landscape as text. The proposal was to consider landscapes as actors able to produce and transform meanings. The task was to uncover the hidden, dominant meanings represented in landscape representations in favour of underrepresented cultural meanings. Despite the promising proposals, geographers especially focused on the meanings of the author of landscape texts, while underestimating the multifaceted interpretations of readers. Likewise, traditional semiotic analysis considered text as an immutable, coherent system of signification produced by a prior authored utterance. In response, this paper advances an approach to include the alternative and unexpected meanings embodied in landscape texts. Following recent developments in semiotic theory, this paper proposes a suitable concept of landscape as text to explain the complexity and the unpredictability of contemporary everyday landscapes.

This book examines the history of Yuri Lotman's Tartu(or Moscow-Tartu) School of Semiotics, which was active in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s, and combines a comparative perspective on the Tartu paradigm with close attention to its social context. Comparing Tartu with other major idioms in cultural theory from Russian Formalism to (post-)structuralism, this study reconstructs its evolution from the early ideal of "exact science" to a variety of conceptual frameworks which combined an emphasis on the autonomy of cultural texts with elaborate analysis of the social and intellectual environment of their production and reception. Working from life history interviews, archival research, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how this evolution reflected and refracted the intellectuals' changing strategies of negotiating personal and professional autonomy and authority within Soviet academia. The Tartu School serves as a window into the distinctive character of intellectual production and the phenomenon of an unofficial public sphere in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and challenges still dominant Cold War assumptions about the nature of Soviet science, culture, and society.
ISBN-10 : 9783639056051
ISBN-13 : 978-3639056051

The chapter explores the mediating role of the Tartu-Moscow school between East- Central and West European scholarly and intellectual traditions, its work of cultural gathering and maintaining the intellectual continuity despite the restrictions and pressures of Soviet censorship.  The school emerged as a result of informal gatherings and publications in the mid-1960s. It brought together representatives of various disciplines (linguistics, literary and art studies, philosophy, history, mathematics and others). Despite the absence of a single metalanguage, the structural-semiotic perspective and broad conceptions of text and language served as integrative links. The chapter traces  differing (phenomenological, functional, quantitative) research trajectories within the school and draws on the conceptions and frameworks whose impact has been long-lasting: the study of mythology and mythopoetics, linguistic typology, narratology, theory of secondary modelling systems (the languages of art), the study of “hypersemiotic” texts (urban semiotics) and poetics of behavior.

Цель нашей статьи – сообщить несколько фактов о семье Ю. М. Лотмана и внести необходимые коррективы в уже имеющуюся информацию. Статья основана на материалах из студенческого дела отца Ю. М. Лотмана, которое находится в Центральном государственном историческом архиве Санкт-Петербурга.

In 1973, a collectively written manifesto titled Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures was penned under the leadership of Tartu scholar Juri Lotman together with his Moscow colleagues Vjacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pjatigorskij, and Boris Uspenskij. The appearance of this work marked the birth of a new scholarly field of research called the semiotics of culture. In the present contribution we provide a bibliographic list of republications and translations of this seminal text.

Questa tesi è un’indagine sul cambiamento in atto nel mondo editoriale finalizza alla realizzazione di una semiotica del progetto, ovvero di un modello semiotico a supporto della progettazione di nuovi artefatti di lettura. Nel primo capitolo viene delineato lo stato dell’arte dell’editoria odierna, fotografata nel caotico passaggio dall'analogico al digitale. Successivamente, nel secondo capitolo, dopo aver sfatato alcuni falsi miti riguardanti il mondo cartaceo e quello tecnologico, viene illustrato come sia mutata l’esperienza della lettura e come potrebbe variare nel prossimo futuro. Il terzo capitolo contiene l’analisi semiotica della pratica della lettura e del testo. Cuore della trattazione, nel capitolo quarto, la conseguente delineazione di un modello interpretativo basato sulla linguistica e sulla semiotica che, partendo dalla definizione del testo quale unità minima di significazione, esemplifichi le relazioni di transtestualità che esso intrattiene con gli altri testi della cultura e i percorsi di interpretazione e azione che il lettore mette in atto durante la lettura, legati alla propria enciclopedia di conoscenze ed esperienze. Tale modello non vuole essere una mera rappresentazione teorica, ma uno schema pratico (per progettisti e addetti al settore editoriale) finalizzato alla comprensione della complessità e alla progettazione consapevole. Vengono introdotte quindi delle linee guida innestate sulla schematizzazione che soddisfino i bisogni del lettore del futuro, ovvero il lettore/scrittore. Infine, il quinto capitolo illustra l’applicazione del modello al testo Manifesto del Terzo paesaggio di Gilles Clément.

Статья посвящена анализу иллюстрированных открыток советской эпохи на при-
мере отдельных экспонатов из собрания Альберто Сандретти. Открытки играют
важную культурную роль в советской семиосфере, где оригинальное произведение
искусства выступает не в качестве конечного пункта, но в качестве точки отсче-
та. Создаваемая в центре, открытка по капиллярам доходит до географической и
культурной периферии Советского Союза, и благодаря карманному формату, невы-
сокой цене и легкой доступности, она с легкостью проникает в разного рода про-
странства, в частности в такое наиболее приватное пространство, как дом. Поэто-
му в статье рассматриваются экземпляры открыток, воспроизводящих жанровую
живопись на бытовые сюжеты, где контекст изображенный совпадает с контекстом бытования самой открытки, которая в таком случае представляет поведенческую и жилищную модель советского повседневного пространства.

Semantic of the narrative space of Gn 2,4-11,9 in a perspective of spatial turn: an application of Jurij M. Lotman´s concept of semiosphere on biblical narrative. Abstract: This study is devoted to the semantic significance of the following biblical spaces: the garden, the field, and the city, mentioned in the textual unit of Gn 2,4-11,9. The default methodological pre-understanding of this contribution consists of the "spatial turn" which considers, in a yet overshadowed category of space, an important structure which determines the significance of the narrative plots which always contain a certain spatial character. This study is based on the theoretical concept of semiosphere by Jurij Lotman which is used to semantic analysis of the textual forms of biblical spaces. Consequentially, an inherent part of this work will also present a problematic of portraying space in the medium of text and the impact of the mythical genre of the textual unit on the interpretation of space. In the closing chapters, the actions of the described narrative textual unit (the fall of man, Kain's murder of Abel, building of the tower of Babel) will be considered as a narrative display of the conflict between the "texts" of individual semiospheres which strive to occupy a dominant position in the system, and thus establish their own content as a structural code of a given space. Finally, the study also applies the Lotman's process of assimilation of foreign texts in semiosphere on the textual unit of a chosen biblical narrative and follows it in the exegetic part.

Giunta alla sua terza pubblicazione, la collana Obratnaja perspektiva / La Prospettiva rovesciata continua la sua missione di indagine e divulgazione di aspetti rilevanti della cultura figurativa russa, approfondendo l’apporto specifico di influenti personalità. Questo volume è dedicato alla figura di Jurij Lotman (1922-1993), il cui pensiero ha ispirato studiosi e pensatori di ogni disciplina e provenienza, come è ben dimostrato dalla presente selezione di interventi, pubblicati in lingua originale, e presentati da studiosi di diverse nazionalità e giovani ricercatori italiani in occasione del convegno “Le Muse fanno il girotondo. Jurij Lotman e le arti” e del seminario propedeutico al convegno stesso. A chiudere la rassegna lotmaniana e il presente volume, entrambi a cura del Centro Studi sulle Arti della Russia (CSAR) dell’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, si propone una selezione di disegni realizzati da Lotman, oggi conservati presso le Università di Tallinn e Tartu.

The aim of this article is to retrace the evolution of Enrico Pea’s intellectual appearence between 1914 and 1958, using Lotman and Uspenskij concept of Izgoj, «degraded»,
meaning a subject both outside and inside the social system of relevance. Through this perspective it will be possibile to identify the way by which the intellectual society mediate the literary and educational anomaly of the self-taught Enrico Pea, fixing it such as «scrittura d’eccezione»: eccentric, unclassifiable, object of obvious assimilation, unsolved difference. Sources of this setting will be traced — using Bourdieu’s field theory — in the aim to convert this cultural strangeness in symbolic capital useful to the literary field’s self-description wherein he’s received, especially Florence avant-guarde and the hermeticism of 1930s. The argument will find support in correspondence and author’s and literary critics’ explanations, in the additional attempt to draw, through the Pea’s case, the italianl iterary field’s autonomization and strenghtening during the considered period, as well as the development of the language fit to describe it
Keywords: Enrico Pea, izgoj, literary field, cultural system, symbolic capital, Pierre Bourdieu, Jurij Lotman, Boris Uspenskij

In September 1987, my friend Marzio Marzaduri and I were in Moscow carrying out our research in public libraries and archives. During our stay, we thought it would be useful to meet with Jurij Lotman, given that Marzio was writing his biography (the first part would be published in 1989 in Milan) and I wished to talk with him about Puškin’s poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus". Thanks to the intermediation of professor Igor’ Černov, Lotman invited us to lunch at his home. On September 29 we arrived in Tartu, where Lotman, together with his wife, Zara Minc, a well-known Blok scholar, welcomed us with great cordiality. The following conversation with Lotman, about "The Prisoner of the Caucasus", its sources and influences, was recorded on tape on that occasion.

The present paper aims at reviewing the current state of research about the relationship between semiotics and power in Jurij M. Lotman. In the first part, the article will illustrate and review the current international researches that apply, in the political field, concepts derived from the Lotmanian theories. The article will examine two cases: the first will be that of cultural studies, where recently some scholars started employing Lotmanian concepts such as autocommunication, boundary, center/periphery. The second will be the case of the so-called semiotic theory of hegemony, developed in Estonia, that combines concepts from Lotman and Laclau. In the second part, the article will instead focus on the historical research concerning the political tropes of Lotman's theory, sparked by the reflection initiated by the researches shown in the first part. Starting from the cultural environment of Lotman's early years, the paper will illustrate how certain semiotic concepts, such as personality and dominant, acquire a political meaning when related to the cultural environment of 1930s Soviet Union.

In un momento in cui l’arte è sempre più prossima alle forme audiovisive del cinema e dei mass media, in cui la pratica della post produzione è sempre più perseguita dagli artisti, anche spazi di produzione cinematografica vengono risemantizzati, mantenendo vive le peculiarità del proprio vissuto. Recensione mostra "Made in Japan" a The Office, Roma 2010.

The present paper is the result of a research started in the Lotman Archives in Tallin, Estonia. Through an analysis of archival material, it aims at reconstructing the origins and meaning of the most political tropes of Lotman’s theories, especially what I will call his theory of the political subject. In the first part, I will argue that, in order to understand this political aspect of Lotman, it is necessary to take into consideration the intellectual debates inside which the author started his intellectual journey in 1930s-1940s Soviet Russia, and how he sought answers to those debates in the works of G. W. Leibniz.
In the final part of the paper, I will try to show how this reconstruction of Lotman’s history could contribute to the contemporary debate in semiotics and other connected disciplines.

This paper departs from the confrontation of a biological-semiotic concept of Umwelt with a psychological-phenomenological concept of Lebenswelt aiming at exhibiting their interpretations in selected investigative domains of the philosophy of nature and culture. The first part is devoted to the question of how the semiotic relationships of animals and humans to their subjective universes are discursively modeled in phenomenology as a study of individual experience that is consciously realized by senses from the first person perspective. Animals are admitted to have relations with actual things in the observable reality through an outward extension of their body, but they are stated to lack a direct access to the things in themselves and to their various forms of being because they cannot transcend the imprisonment of their surroundings. In the second part exposing the framework of existential semiotics, the existence modes of animal and human subjects are considered in terms of being in the world as immanence and being for the world as transcendence. Immanent subjects are explained as existing in their environments and transcendent subjects as being able to go beyond their life-world. Reassuming the similarities and differences between the research conclusions of philosophers and psychologists, the author puts forward investigative postulates addressed to anthropo-logical linguistics or linguistic anthropology substantiating the search for the defining characteristics of speech derivable from the contrast between the verbal and non-verbal means of communication used in the world of humans and animals.

In the remote border landscape along the Iron Curtain Katharina Eisch sets off to ask for the border, to follow its signs, images and stories under the surface of a closed-up present time. A topography of border and memory spaces leads into the centre of European contemporary history, its boundaries and transitions, up to the divide between Germans and Czechs. And then, right in the midst of the research work, the Velvet Revolution breaks the firmly joined order of East and West, and opens the experience of a new epochal change as current process of border crossing.
With an open ear for the “language of the border” the author draws the image of a border line that not only marks the Bohemian Forest landscape, but also traverses everyday practices and collective memory, narratives and perspectival world views. A semiotic approach transgresses regional boundaries towards the differential and culture-generating dynamics of “the border” as such.
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In einer abseitigen Grenzlandschaft am Eisernen Vorhang beginnt Katharina Eisch, nach der Grenze zu fragen, ihren Zeichen, Bildern und Geschichten unter der Oberfläche einer verschlossenen Gegenwart nachzugehen. Eine Topographie von Grenz- und Gedächtnisraum führt ins Zentrum europäischer Zeitgeschichte, zu ihren Grenzziehungen und Grenzüberschreitungen, bis hin zum Trennstrich zwischen Deutschen und Tschechen. Und dann, mitten in der Forschungsarbeit, bricht die “Samtene Revolution“ die festgefügte Ordnung von Ost und West und läßt einen erneuten Zeitenwechsel als aktuellen Übergang über die Grenze miterleben.
Mit einem offenen Ohr für die „Sprache der Grenze“ entwirft die Autorin das Bild einer Grenzlinie, die sich nicht nur durch die Böhmerwaldlandschaft zieht, sondern auch durch Alltagspraxen und kollektives Gedächtnis, durch Erzählungen und perspektivische Weltbilder. Eine semiotische Fragestellung überschreitet dabei die regionalen Grenzen der Untersuchung: Es geht um die differenzsetzende und kulturschaffende Dynamik von „Grenze“ schlechthin.

Die un-sichtbare Stadt. Perspektiven – Räume – Randfiguren in Literatur und Film, hrsg. v. Gisela Febel, Katia Harbrecht, Karen Struve, Bielefeld: transcript 2020, 175-192. (URL: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4658-0/die-un-sichtbare-stadt/)

07-05-2018, Conference of the "Gesellschaft der Germanisten Rumäniens", Oradea, Romania --- War literature often employs rather schematic spatial setups, and the development of such setups is closely related to the development of modern warfare. After a brief overview of different types of spatial representation in poems from World War I, the article interprets two poems by Wilhelm Klemm who seem to use a spatial model that differs from more conventional works of the same time. The theory of semiotic subjects developed by Jurij M. Lotman is used to make sense of this idiosyncratic spatial model.