American Signatures

"American Signatures" takes a fresh approach to the recent history of semiotics by focusing primarily on work done in the United States. In a series of new and reprinted essays, Thomas A.Sebeok, assesses major contributions to semiotic theory, method, and practice in America, including the seminal ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Morris, and other Americans whose ideas coalesced and built each other to produce the discipline of semiotics as we know it today. Also illumuinated is the work of emigre scholars such as Roman Jakobson, Ernst Cassirer, and Jacques Maritain, who combined Saussurean linguistics with the work of these Americans, turning the study of semiotics in new directions. Sebeok has been involved in American semiotics for almost half a century and therefore often speaks here as a witness. He uses his own history to trace ideas from one individual to the next, tying together personalities, events, and speculation, and showing the path by which the semiotic concerns of physicists, biologists, linguists, and literary and other humanistic scholars began to overlap and interact.