Everyone out there, what do you know about semiotics?
I'm looking into a PhD program at the Universidad de Guadalajara, in part because I adore the city but mostly because I think the program is right up my alley. It's a program in Literature and Linguistics, two of my great loves, and I wouldn't necessarily have to choose between them as I did with the MA. So, I'm trying to brush up on all those literary theory places where my knowledge is scant. I say "brush up", but wow this is a big job. I'm trying to settle on a theoretical bent that suits me and my interdisciplinary approach, so I'm looking at philosophy-of-language theorists. I also think that's a suitable approach to my favored area of Hispanic Literature: ahem, Colonial. Friends from my program poke fun at me for that, but I love Colonial Lit. There's so much more to it than just the text; so much depends on context. It's a fascinating period to me because, even be it one-sidedly, it documents the collision between such wildly different worlds and worldviews, and the Spanish were scrambling to find a way to express themselves in their Brave New World, and they had to reformulate their Eastern Hemisphere discourse. This meant reorienting and recontextualizing symbolic thinking. As I perceive it, anyway.
So, I'm leaning toward semiotics. It's a bit like semantics and pragmatics (a course I adored in the MA, minus a few opaque lectures), and focuses largely on symbols and contextual meaning. I think I may have found it. . .
I'm starting soft, though. I just started reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, because it's supposed to be the great fictional text in which he shows off the application of the theory in fiction. We'll see if I can grasp it. Then I'm going to read a little more Kristeva, and if I get her then I might take a stab at Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and all those other françoises.
Damn, how I hope I'm zeroing in on a fruitful theoretical approach, one within which I can operate, and perhaps even add to it someday. And oh, how I hope I can grasp it.
Lola will penetrate this novel, dangit. Er, comprehend. I'll stay away from that oh-so-phallic verb for now.
2 comments:
Well I feel dumb. That's a lotta big words and authors I've never heard of.
If the PhD. makes you happy then go, go, go! Good luck.
Funny, eh? There we are so blissfully happy to be done with school and just a few weeks later we are back to scheming new research ideas and plotting new projects ;o) You and I are incorrigible nerds.
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