On January 10, Silvi Salupere will defend her PhD thesis in semiotics titled "On Juri Lotman's Metalanguage: Problems, Context, and Sources"

On January 10, 2018 at 12.15, Jakobi 2-336, Silvi Salupere will defend her thesis proposed for doctoral degree, titled "О метаязыке Юрия Лотмана: проблемы, контекст, источники" („Juri Lotmani metakeelest: probleemid, kontekst, allikad“ (On Juri Lotman's Metalanguage: Problems, Context, and Sources))

Supervisor: Irina Avramets (PhD)

Oponents: Peter Grzybek (Ao. Univ. Prof. Mag. Dr., University of Graz, Austria) ja Kestutis Nastopka (Prof. Habil. Dr, A.J. Greimas Centre of Semiotics and Literary Theory, Vilnius)

Abstract:

Silvi Salupere’s doctoral dissertation On Juri Lotman’s Metalanguage: Problems, context, and sources explores the genesis, dynamics, change, and evolution of Juri Lotman’s metalanguage. The study focuses on Lotman’s semiotic work and does not extend to the pre-structuralist period. Dissatisfaction with contemporary methods of literary scholarship led Lotman to see the necessity of developing the scientific study of literature. The dissertation explores the impact of structuralist, semiotic, mathematical, information theory, cybernetic and linguistic concepts on Lotman’s metalanguage. It demonstrates how the semiotics of culture germinated in structural poetics and the study of artistic texts, and how the concept itself of culture, increasingly “subjectified”, culminated in the understanding of culture as a collective mind. The dissertation considers Lotman’s metalanguage as a systemic whole, as based on the Lotmanian “dynamic model of a semiotic system” structured by the oppositions of statics and dynamics, systemic and non-systemic, monolingual and multilingual, center and periphery, described and non-described. During the last decade of Lotman’s life, the focus of his interest lay in the second part of the opposition and the possibility to capture and adequately describe the non-discrete, continual, and non-systemic – the so-called “contrastive/contrast semiotics” where science and art, logic and rhetoric meet.