四川大学将于2015年7月5日——2015年7月18日开展“实践及国际课程周”。本次活动邀请了8位国际知名教授，Paul Cobley 教授和Anthony Jappy 教授将分别开设符号学课程Semiotics of Culture以及Semiotics Applied To The Studies Of Today'S Culture。
Semiotics of Culture
This course investigates the semiotics of culture through a ‘modelling systems theory’ approach. It analyses a range of issues in culture with reference to recent findings in the field of biosemiotics. Topics include ‘text’, ‘everyday life’, ‘magic’ and ‘art’.
Semiotics Applied To The Studies Of Today'S Culture
Although it compares the two major semiotics theories, the Peircean and the Saussurean, the series of courses focuses principally on the semiotics of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. This, unlike other theories of the sign which implicitly or explicitly take the word (generally the written word) as the reference value, introduces students to semiotics using pictorial data as its prime examples. This makes it possible to isolate more clearly the specific properties of word and image and their respective limits as the basic constituents of a wide range of contemporary cultural artefacts. However, since the distinction between Peircean and Saussurean theories of the sign involves different epistemologies and even different metaphysics, in one sense of the term, at some stage the course will deal with the general philosophical background as it developed in the course of the twentieth century in the West.
Among the more general topics to be discussed are the notions of sign, code, nonverbal communication signs, the ecology of signs, pictorial metaphor and allegory and the rhetoric of the image and, more generally, attitudes to our allegedly visual culture.
On completion of the series of courses the student will be expected to be able to understand the ways in which cultural artefacts of various kinds (paintings, photographs, movie posters and advertisements, etc.) function as signs. This understanding should be demonstrated in the student’s ability to think critically about these issues and to adopt an appropriate technical vocabulary when discussing them in any future research.
