Through a reevaluation of the work of some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, this book details how semiotics, social sense, and social communication can function together to analyze how culture works in the contemporary era.

Universe of the Mind A Semiotic Theory of Culture Yuri M. Lotman Introduction by Umberto Eco Translated by Ann Shukman A major book by one of the initiators of cultural studies. "Universe of the Mind is an ambitious, complex, and wide-ranging book that semioticians, textual critics, and those interested in cultural studies will find stimulating and immensely suggestive." --Journal of Communication "Soviet semiotics offers a distinctive, richly productive approach to literary and cultural studies and Universe of the Mind represents a summation of the intellectual career of the man who has done most to guarantee this." --Slavic and East European Journal Universe of the Mind addresses three main areas: meaning and text, culture, and history. The result is a full-scale attempt to demonstrate the workings of the semiotic space or intellectual world. Part One is concerned with the ways that texts generate meaning. Part Two addresses Lotman's central idea of the semiosphere--the domain in which all semiotic systems can function--presented through an analogy with the global biosphere. Part Three focuses on semiotics from the point of view of history. A seminal text in cultural semiotics, the book's ambitious scope also makes it applicable to disciplines outside semiotics. The book will be of great interest to those concerned with cultural studies, anthropology, Slavic studies, critical theory, philosophy, and historiography. Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is the founder of the Moscow-Tartu School and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics.

Arthur Asa Berger's unique ability to translate difficult theories into accessible language makes this book an ideal introduction to cultural criticism. Berger covers the key theorists, concepts, and subject areas, from literary, sociological and psychoanalytical theories to semiotics and Marxism. Cultural Criticism breathes new life into the discipline by making these theories relevant to students' lives. The author illustrates his explanations with excerpts from classic works giving readers a sense of the important thinkers' styles and helping place them in their context. Berger also provides a comprehensive bibliography on cultural criticism for those who wish to explore the topics at greater length. Cultural Criticism is the perfect undergraduate supplemental text for such courses as media studies, literary criticism, and popular culture.

The book demonstrates sociolinguistic patterns at work in Elizabethan ideological conflicts, at a level that shows how those patterns were related to the energies of people's sexuality and their political and religious commitments.

This book aims to inscribe the prominent Soviet semiologist Yurii Lotman into the analysis of political forms and components of power as seen from the context of various Russian-European encounters.

This collection of essays presents the materials of the Third Annual Juri Lotman Days at Tallinn University in Estonia (3–5 June 2011). The participants discussed the semiotics of urban space from the perspective of the Tartu-Moscow School in comparison with contemporary approaches. This book consists of four sections. The articles in the first section discuss how “urban texts” function in modern and contemporary Baltic cultures. The papers in the second section focus on the semiotics of place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture from the perspective of linguistic poetics, cultural semiotics, and new materiality. The last two sections are devoted to the visual perceptions of the cityscape and their ideological interpretations as exemplified by Ukrainian, Estonian, Korean, Chinese, and North American illustrations.