Academic Studies Press Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux. An Anthology of Major and Lesser-Known Works (Cultural Syllabus)

Review “Featuring a comprehensive selection of thoughtfully collected, newly translated, and thoroughly commented works by the prominent twentieth-century Russian scholar and thinker Yuri Lotman, this anthology will serve generations of students and researchers. The anthology covers key topics and concepts that gained Lotman his international acclaim: the poetics of everyday behavior; semiotics of boundary, space, and event; urban semiotics; semiotics of predictability and chance. It traces Lotman’s evolution from structuralist to complex system approaches and puts his work in a dialogue with contemporary concerns, such as gender, performance, and memory. Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux reveals that the ideas of semiotic fluidity, disruption, displacement, code-switching, and multivoicedness remained central throughout Lotman’s entire works.”―Marina Grishakova, co-editor of Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy Product Description Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major pieces as well as works that have never been published in English. The collection brings Lotman into the orbit of contemporary concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and urban life. It is aimed at students from various disciplines and is augmented by an introduction and notes that elucidate the relevant contexts. About the Author Andreas Schönle is Professor of Russian at the University of Bristol and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of four monographs and three edited volumes. His most recent monograph is On the Periphery of Europe, 1762-1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (2018), co-authored with Andrei Zorin.Benjamin Paloff is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His books include Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe and the poetry collections And His Orchestra and The Politics, and he is the translator, most recently, of Dorota Masłowska's Honey, I Killed the Cats.