Subject collection: Semiotics (98 titles, 1967–2015)

This volume, a sequel to Form Miming Meaning (1999), offers a selection of papers given at the second international symposium on iconicity (Amsterdam 1999). In the light of semiotic, linguistic and literary theory the studies gathered here investigate how iconicity works on all levels of language, in literary texts and other forms of verbal discourse. They investigate, among other subjects, the semiotic foundations of iconicity, the role played by iconicity in language evolution and in the way words are positioned syntactically. Special consideration is given to the iconic nature of metaphor and the ‘mise en abyme’, to iconically motivated punctuation and other typographic matters such as the manipulation of colour, fonts and spacing in advertising and in poetry. Other studies show how iconicity influences Shakespeare’s rhetoric, the structural design of Margaret Atwood’s writings and the changing fashions in fictional landscape description. Thus, these analyses of ‘the motivated sign’ represent yet another strong challenge to “Saussure’s dogma of arbitrariness” (Jakobson).

Translated by Paul Perron Maupassant's short story, “Two Friends”, is examined in order to test methodological tools and to hone them for their application in the analysis of narrative discourse, starting from the oral tale (Propp) and ending with the written tale instituted as literary genre. Complex procedures of textual production are identified: among which entire sequences as well as the “evenemential” level of narrative fade away in favor of its cognitive dimension. This semiotic investigation is accompanied by a challenge to certain conventions of literary criticism: dialogue, the locus of Realist stereotypes, appears laden with paradoxical truths; the description of nature, inherited from the Romantics, bristles with narrative intent, and entire sections of a valorized figurative universe unfold before us. Thematic readings are linked up with semantic analysis: the figure of Water exerts its profound fascination. A Christian symbolics is uncovered which traverses the text and invites us to read it as a new Gospel Parable. New readings complement older ones and remain as so many suspended possibilities. The tale appears somewhat as a sonnet, that is to say as a “fixed-form” genre, where the closure of the text would be a necessary condition for transcending it.

Vorliegende Arbeit, welche die Bedeutung der Musik im antiken Rom zum Gegenstand hat, versucht eine Zusammenschau hundertjähriger Einzelforschung verschiedener Disziplinen, um Altertums- und Musikwissenschaft durch Darstellung und Quellendokumentation zu neuem Verständnis und neuer Bewertung einer bislang teils unbekannten, teils verkannten Epoche abendländischer Musik- und Geistesgeschichte anzuregen.Inhalt: I. Einführung in Problem und Beweisziel, Geschichte der Forschung und Form der Darstellung; II. Die Musik im kultischen Leben der Römer; III. Die Musik im militärischen Leben der Römer; IV. Gesang und Instrumentalmusik im täglichen Leben der Römer; V. Die Musik im römischen Theater und Zirkus, bei Unterhaltung und Tanz; VI. Das Kunstlied im alten Rom; VII. Die Musik in der römischen Gesellschaft; VIII. Das Verhältnis früher römischer Christen zur Musik; IX. Die Musik in der römischen Bildung; X. Musikalische Bildung in Rhetorik, Grammatik und Mythologie; XI. Nachrichten über Musik in Werken der Geschichtsschreibung, Architektur, Kunstgeschichte, Paradoxographie und Astrologie; XII. Die spätantiken lateinischen Musiktheoretiker; XIII. Zusammenfassung; Register.