Originally published in French in 1991 by Les Editions du Seuil, Paris. Raises and explores such questions as: What are the necessary conditions for the existence of passion? Can passion be submitted to a logic of language? Does passion allow systemic semiotic transformations? Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.

It has often been claimed that the aim of semiotics is to establish a general theory of systems of signification. However, as Jean-Claude Coquet notes in a recent collection of essays, what distinguishes one school of semiotics from another is the initial definition given of sign. If, for certain semioticians, the sign is first of all an observable phenomenon, for the Paris School it is first of all a construct and this point of departure has crucial theoretical and practical consequences. The essays appearing in these two volumes are representative of recent work carried out by members of this semiotic school. Essays in Volume I study problems more closely related to theoretical issues, while Volume II focuses more specifically on various fields of application.

The book covers almost the whole range of semiotics: the conceptions of meaning, the appearance of meaning units in semiosis, the dichotomy analyticity/syntheticity, the formal condition of good translation, the metaphorical change in fine arts, the figurativeness in modern literary theories, the metaphor in computer translation, the conditionals with egocentric predicates, the evolution of the notion of cause, the temporal relation in conditionals, the structure of passive voice, the semantics of to think, the reasoning and rationality, the non-formalized reasoning, the operation of acceptance, the principle of non-contradiction, the relation semiotics/logic/philosophy, the interdisciplinarity and exactness, the notion of imprecision, the interpretation of some semiotic notions (i.a. semantic field of terms) in terms of mathematics, the description of categorial grammars in terms of model theory, the human knowledge as moral problem, the conceptualization of the development of knowledge by means of the notion of meme, the cultural relations between some European countries, the typology of scientists, the semiotic studies of some Spanish, Irish, Czech, Polish and Norwegian works of literature, the semiotic aspects of music, television and the whole sphere of artifacts, the history of semiotics (Plato, Gonsung Long, Descartes, Fu Yen, Peirce, Brwal, Lotman, Langer).

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, and facilitates the discovery and recovery of meaning across fields. It comprises: Volume 1: History and Semiosis Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Written by leading international experts, the chapters provide comprehensive overviews of the history and status of semiotic inquiry across a diverse range of traditions and disciplines. Together, they highlight key contemporary developments and debates along with ongoing research priorities. Providing the most comprehensive and united overview of the field, Bloomsbury Semiotics enables anyone, from students to seasoned practitioners, to better understand and benefit from semiotic insight and how it relates to their own area of study or research. Volume 1: History and Semiosis provides a general and historical orientation to semiotic traditions and their methodologies, followed by an in-depth overview of critical issues in the study of sign systems and semiosis. It ends with an exploration of issues of sign classification and practical application, setting the scene for the remaining volumes.

The book is an in-depth presentation of the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has four parts: a historical introduction, the analysis of langue, narrative theory and communication theory. Part I briefly presents all the semiotic schools and their main points of reference. Although this material is accessible in many other Anglophone publications, the presentation is marked by specific choices aiming to display similarities and differences. The analysis of langue in Part II is also available in Anglophone bibliography, but the book presents Saussurean theory according to a new theoretical rationale and enriched with later developments. In addition, it is orientated so as to offer the foundation for the part that follows. Part III is a presentation of Greimasian narrative theory, well documented in Francophone bibliography but poorly represented in Anglophone publications. The presentation extends the theory in both a qualitative and a new quantitative direction, and includes a great number of examples and two extended textual analyses to help the reader understand and apply it. Part IV, communication theory, combines an extension of Greimasian sociosemiotics with other schools of thought. This original theoretical section discusses fourteen consecutive communication models, the synthesis of which results in a holistic, social semiotic theory of communication.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

Original Scholarly Monograph

In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain's empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire's many layers of conflict and ambivalence. Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others--and deft use of psychoanalytic theory--The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.