Bücher der Reihe Semiotics, Communication and Cognition

Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema engages with very vital problems posed by Peirce's philosophy in an innovative and inter-disciplinary fashion by examining how documentary film practice can engage with the question of emergent human agency within a wider biosphere shared by human animals and non-human animals alike.The book is in many ways a celebration of human inquiry, taking liberally from Peirce's semeiotic and parallel ideas within recent visual anthropology. Through an analysis of the work of three renowned filmmakers - Jon Jost, Johan Van der Keuken, and Rithy Panh - Semiotics and Documentary Film: The Living Sign in the Cinema reasserts human agency within a global age, dominated by philosophical scepticism and an unquestioning subservience to mechanistic military techno-culture.The author argues that an approach to documentary inquiry, broadly derived from Peirce's sign theory, phenomenology, and overall philosophical outlook, has strong advantages over atemporal formal approaches derived from Saussurean semiology.Nevertheless, this project is also both critical and self-critical. It also bears direct testament to the many tumultuous and life-destroying events of the late 20th century and reminds us of the moral and philosophical problems which we are still grappling with in the early 21st century. Hence - the Living Sign.

Hitherto, there has been no book that attempted to sum up the breadth of Umberto Ecös work and it importance for the study of semiotics, communication and cognition. There have been anthologies and overviews of Ecös work within Eco Studies; sometimes, works in semiotics have used aspects of Ecös work. Yet, thus far, there has been no overview of the work of Eco in the breadth of semiotics. This volume is a contribution to both semiotics and Eco studies. The 40 scholars who participate in the volume come from a variety of disciplines but have all chosen to work with a favorite quotation from Eco that they find particularly illustrative of the issues that his work raises. Some of the scholars have worked exegetically placing the quotation within a tradition, others have determined the (epistemic) value of the quotation and offered a critique, while still others have seen the quotation as a starting point for conceptual developments within a field of application. However, each article within this volume points toward the relevance of Eco -- for contemporary studies concerning semiotics, communication and cognition.