Semiotics At The Circus

ISBN: 9783110218299 出版年：2010 页码：207 Bouissac, Paul De Gruyter Mouton

Semiotics is long on theoretical, often obscure discourses, but short on applications that demonstrate with clarity the applicability of its methods. This book confronts a challenging object, the circus, and endeavors to describe its performances in ways that explain how circus acts produce meaning and cause a deep emotional involvement for their audiences. The approach is not top-down, such as would be a method that would dogmatically apply a particular theory to fully explain the phenomena in terms of this theory alone. Epistemologically, this book is an example of the bottom-up strategy, which consists of considering first the objects and heuristically calling upon methodological resources in a broad theoretical array to come to grips with the problems that are encountered. Any circus act is a complex event that has cognitive and emotional dimensions.