Overview

These essays define the new philosophical field of existential semiotics. Existential semiotics involves an ""a priori"" state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. There is a hermeneutic and phenomenological aspect to the work. Its sources are in Husserl, Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger. As a member of the Paris School of Semiotics (A.J. Greimas in particular), Tarasti is seeking less categorical, less Cartesian approaches. He sees semiotics in transition, shift, rupture and flux, something which is becoming rather than being. His theoretical ideas are illustratd with examples from high culture - painting, music and literature - as well as from current day media and popular culture, including landscapes, gastronomy, novels, Walt Disney, film advertising as narratives, and post-colonial practices. Signs are examined in their interdisciplinary as well as intertextual connections.

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Reviews

<p> Tarasti's explanations, analyses and comments of sign processes in artand everyday lifemight seem amazing at first sight. He is not afraid of heavilyspeculative and heavily metaphysical thinking.... [he] wants to show us that therecan be more involved in sign processes than pure conventionality, maybe evensomething that is beyond the grasp of the Semiotician. -- KODIKAS, 342004

Author Information

Eero Tarasti holds the Chair of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. One of the world's leading semioticians, he is founder and President of the Semiotic Society of Finland, Director of the International Semiotics Institute at Imatra, and author of numerous articles and books, including A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Indiana University Press).

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