A Semiotic Web

Page 14 American Book Review A Semiotic Web Dinda L. Gorlée Marcel Danesi is a professor of semiotics in Toronto and used to lecturing students about his discipline. Following his earlier volume Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics (1993), his recent The Quest for Meaning—with the subtitle A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice—takes a fresh approach to the recent history and the present of semiotics. Danesi achieves this goal by writing in 193 pages a reference point for freshmen students, but he also seems to address scholars more advanced in years, such as anthropologists, archeologists, artists, biologists, or other professionals, who could embrace the interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) methodology of semiotics with its vocabulary and terminology. Students and teachers of semiotics want to hear more about the “working” of the simple and complex sign-events around us. We could offer a selection of verbal and nonverbal signs, such as a touch of fever, an aroma, a national flag, a traffic signal, hieroglyphs, the patterns of a fossil, a clone, a presidential campaign, or a catastrophe. Danesi tells us, in his commentaries on the mosaic image of the mysteries of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), the history of the V-sign, Saint Augustine ’s magical rustling of leaves, the religious cross symbol, male and female icons on washroom doors, carvings and figures of rock art, diagrams in DNA profile, proper names and surnames, totems, a mythical lion, cryptography, the superhero Superman, and the Star Wars movie saga (see further items in the index). Yet Danesi’s signs are no decorative abstraction to highlight an introductory textbook. They are fascinating sign-events with one or several meanings , for anyone interested in mystifying problems revealed by the sign users. There is lots of semiotic skill and pedadogical (or rhetorical) advice involved in how Danesi suggests the signs and their parts or elements, giving them shapes, forms, and uses. He has a sharp eye for a good story, and a sense for lucid details in his illustrations and explanations. Human reality seems clear to the eyes and ears (and other senses), but the “reality” is often vague in historical or ritual meaning. This fuzziness deserves study and thought to be deciphered accurately. We tend to concentrate and take action on the superhuman and artificial signs in our environment. Hyperbolically, we piece together and weigh the substantial, anecdotal, impressionistic, or even chilling evidences caught up with us. Semiotics offers one unifying matrix or technique mediating knowledge to produce (or create) meaning in verbal and nonverbal, vocal and nonvocal, pictorial and nonpictorial , visual and nonvisual, visible and invisible , natural and conventional, technical and nontechnical, and magical and daily signs. The semiotic way-of-life occurs in fiction and life where it depicts in all modalities the symbols and values of the world and its human “reality.” Semiotics is no less than our multimedial symbiosis; its task is to give signs a meaning. This meaning does not correspond to the truth, but is any meaning— good versus evil and intermediate—we seem The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice Marcel Danesi University of Toronto Press http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca 193 pages; cloth, $50.00; paper, $19.95 to like or even dislike. Danesi’s “guide” to students and teachers comprises a practical course of seven lessons for a wide range of abilities. The introduction provides a practical framework of graded progression in semiotics , while achieving some theoretical foundation and greatly benefiting from the bibliography. Chapter 1 is a humble attempt to sketch out a history of semiotics, and Danesi also introduces the main trends, ideas, and figures in semiotics. Danesi discusses the elusive term “meaning” (and the synonyms sense, reference, and definition), as well as the division into denotation and connotation. Subsequently, he deals with the differences between the semiotic schools—one based on semiology of literature (also called structuralism) in the Saussurean tradition, the other is based on Peirce’s logico-philosophical background. Semiology is the study of signs focusing on the psychical structure of the sign (its signifier) linking the sign with the object represented in the sign (signified). Semiology does not ask...

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