Empire of Signs

Empire of Signs PDF Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374522070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book

Book Description
This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.

Empire of Signs

Empire of Signs PDF Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374522070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book

Book Description
This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.

Empire of Signs

Empire of Signs PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780809020133
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Get Book

Book Description


The Empire of Signs

The Empire of Signs PDF Author: Yoshihiko Ikegami
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027285934
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book

Book Description
Like Roland Barthes' well-known book, L’Empire des signes, from which the title of the present collection is taken, this volume contains essays dealing with certain aspects of Japanese culture.

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs PDF Author: Karen Fang
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813928826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
Nineteenth-century periodicals frequently compared themselves to the imperial powers then dissecting the globe, and this interest in imperialism can be seen in the exotic motifs that surfaced in works by such late Romantic authors as John Keats, Charles Lamb, James Hogg, Letitia Landon, and Lord Byron. Karen Fang explores the collaboration of these authors with periodical magazines to show how an interdependent relationship between these visual themes and rhetorical style enabled these authors to model their writing on the imperial project. Fang argues that in the decades after Waterloo late Romantic authors used imperial culture to capitalize on the contemporary explosion of periodical magazines. This proliferation of "post-Napoleonic" writing—often referencing exotic locales—both revises longstanding notions about literary orientalism and reveals a remarkable synthesis of Romantic idealism with contemporary cultural materialism that heretofore has not been explored. Indeed, in interlocking case studies that span the reach of British conquest, ranging from Greece, China, and Egypt to Italy and Tahiti, Fang challenges a major convention of periodical publication. While periodicals are usually thought to be defined by time, this account of the geographic attention exerted by late Romantic authors shows them to be equally concerned with space. With its exploration of magazines and imperialism as a context for Romantic writing, culture, and aesthetics, this book will appeal not only to scholars of book history and reading cultures but also to those of nineteenth-century British writing and history.

Signs and Images

Signs and Images PDF Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: French List
ISBN: 9781803092744
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator--often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another--he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume four, Signs and Images, gathers pieces related to his central concerns--semiotics, visual culture, art, cinema, and photography--and features essays on Marthe Arnould, Lucien Clergue, Daniel Boudinet, Richard Avedon, Bernard Faucon, and many more.

Japanese Notebooks

Japanese Notebooks PDF Author:
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452163898
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book

Book Description
Japan is a place of special fascination for the acclaimed international comics creator Igort, who has visited and lived there more than 20 times, and worked in the country's manga industry for more than a decade. In this masterful new book—part graphic memoir, part cultural meditation—Igort vividly recounts his personal experiences in Japan, creating comics amid the activities of everyday life, and finding inspiration everywhere: in nature, history, custom, art, and encounters with creators including animation visionary Hayao Miyazaki. With beautifully illustrated reflections on subjects from printmaking to Zen Buddhism, imperial history to the samurai code, Japanese film, literature, and manga, this is a richly rewarding book for anyone interested in Japan or comic arts practiced at the highest level.

Latin, Or, The Empire of the Sign

Latin, Or, The Empire of the Sign PDF Author: Françoise Waquet
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859846155
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book

Book Description
"Latin: A Symbol's Empire is a work of reference and a piece of cultural history: the story of a language that became a symbol with its own, highly significant empire."--BOOK JACKET.

Barthes and the Empire of Signs

Barthes and the Empire of Signs PDF Author: Peter Pericles Trifonas
Publisher: Totem Books
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book

Book Description
Roland Barthes' imaginative or fictive exploration of Japan prompted him to examine the social and historical contingency of signs, how their meaning changes through time and in different contexts.

Empire of Ivory

Empire of Ivory PDF Author: Naomi Novik
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 0345502337
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education comes the fourth volume of the Temeraire series, as the Napoleonic Wars bring Will Laurence and Temeraire to Africa in search of aid. “Temeraire is a dragon for the ages.”—Terry Brooks Tragedy has struck His Majesty's Aerial Corps, whose magnificent fleet of fighting dragons and their human captains valiantly defends England’s shores against the encroaching armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. An epidemic of unknown origin and no known cure is decimating the noble dragons’ ranks—forcing the hopelessly stricken into quarantine. Now only Temeraire and a pack of newly recruited dragons remain uninfected—and stand as the only means of an airborne defense against France's ever bolder sorties. Bonaparte’s dragons are already harrowing Britain’s ships at sea. Only one recourse remains: Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence, must take wing to Africa, whose shores may hold the cure for the mysterious and deadly contagion. On this mission there is no time to waste, and no telling what Don’t miss any of Naomi Novik’s magical Temeraire series HIS MAJESTY’S DRAGON • THRONE OF JADE • BLACK POWDER WAR • EMPIRE OF IVORY • VICTORY OF EAGLES • TONGUES OF SERPENTS • CRUCIBLE OF GOLD • BLOOD OF TYRANTS • LEAGUE OF DRAGONS

Green Gold

Green Gold PDF Author: Alan Macfarlane
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448116201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Apart from water, tea is more widely consumed than any other food or drink. Tens of billions of cups are drunk every day. How and why has tea conquered the world? Tea was the first global product. It altered life-styles, religions, etiquette and aesthetics. It raised nations and shattered empires. Economies were changed out of all recognition. Diseases were thwarted by the magical drink and cities founded on it. The industrial revolution was fuelled by tea, sealing the fate of the modern world. Green Gold is a remarkable detective story of how an East Himalayan camellia bush became the world's favourite drink. Discover how the tea plant came to be transplanted onto every continent and relive the stories of the men and women whose lives were transformed out of all recognition through contact with the deceptively innocuous green leaf.