Abstract

This is a book that should be read by anyone today seriously interested in semiotics. The issues dealt with are of utmost importance in our world of generalized semiotic indifference and misinformation. It provides a theoretical-philosophical approach to semiotics today comparable in intensity to the historical-philosophical approach to semiotics found in John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding (2001). This master work by Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio is worthy of much praise for it’s ambitious scope and detail; in the limits of this review I will be listing only some of the good that they write; my purpose in a brief compass is to inspire readers to go the book itself, and read it whole. In fact, whatever I say in the manner of particular criticisms must be seen in the light of my general opinion that this work is simply “must reading” for students of semiotics. The duo of Petrilli and Ponzio are already well-known in the semiotic park as being wordsmiths and indefagitable explainers of concepts. Their teaching credentials are excellent. Petrilli, originally from Australia, has published extensively in Italian as well as in English, including articles about Victoria Welby, a figure who provides the major impetus for one of the chapters in this present volume. She has also published on Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Morris, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Thomas A. Sebeok, who also figure prominently here in this volume. For many of these authors she would be our first teacher-explainer, since most of us are not familiar with these thinkers. She translates and cogitates on the process of translation, which is an activity I also love to do. Beaudelaire, Borges, Valery and Donne figure among the translations that Ponzio, an Italian national, has provided on his own web-site, among the impressive array of publications that this philosopher of language and general linguistics has produced. Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin and Rossi-Landi are specialities of his. His latest work, The Dialogic Nature of Sign, was released in 2007, concerning dialogue and dialectics, and reflects on how even a single word is in effect an

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