Papers by christina ljungberg
Sign Systems Studies, Jul 1, 2010
Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, 2010
Laurie Anderson’s multimedia performance White Lily openswitha computer-animated projection of a ... more Laurie Anderson’s multimedia performance White Lily openswitha computer-animated projection of a figure running in slow motion. Anderson then enters into view backwards against the animated runner who disappears to the left, while Anderson moves across to centre stage to electronic music punctuated by clock chimes. Dressed in a white suit and accompanied by her silhouette shadow generated by a strong circular projection, Anderson has her movements doubled by the shadow, as she presents a short text about her memory of a brief conversation in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s1 film Berlin Alexanderplatz.2 This short sequence is reshaped into a poem recited by Anderson, at the same time as she makes punctuating gestures with her right arm, ending by making a backwards sign. The performance concludes with the projection of the central symbol, the white lily, held by the hand of a white silhouette in a still that is left standing against the dark, as Anderson moves out of the centre and disappears to the right. The animated figure then reappears and fades out, with only the music playing in the dark.
In communication and media studies, the concept of ‘media’ is used to refer to the classical mass... more In communication and media studies, the concept of ‘media’ is used to refer to the classical mass media newspaper, book, radio, popular music, film, and television. More recently, the concept has been extended to cover writing or even speech in general, music, painting, photography, video, the internet or computer games, which no longer qualify as media interacting with the ‘masses.’ Intermediality, then, concerns the transgression of the borders between such media, e.g., between different sign systems and/or the iconic enactment of one medium within another. It also involves the modality of a specific medium. W.J.T. Michell (this volume) calls it the question about ‘senses’ and ‘signs,’ which pertains to the sensory modality, mainly visual, oral, or tactile, (the use of olfactory signs, as in Divine’s Odorama, was a short, even if rather successful, attempt), and the semiotic register of sign functions. What happens to these modalities and to these functions when various media inte...
Cultures in Conflict / Conflicting Cultures looks at the tensions and disputes that pervade Ameri... more Cultures in Conflict / Conflicting Cultures looks at the tensions and disputes that pervade American culture. Focusing primarily on various structural areas of confrontation, the essays in this collection explore the diverse forms of artistic expression these conflicts take in photography, film, television, digital technologies, and advertising.
Intermediality concerns either the transgression of the boundaries between conventionally distinc... more Intermediality concerns either the transgression of the boundaries between conventionally distinct media or the iconic enactment of one medium within another. How does this function in such a complex multimedia work as Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which not only comments on other media but also addresses all other adaptations of Shakespeare’s play? How is the figure of dislocation – shipwrecks, loss of home and culture, the disorientation generated by Prospero's masques – translated into Greenaway's postmodern adaptation? To what degree does adaptation itself involve dislocation as Shakespeare's figuration of dislocation resonates throughout Greenaway's multimedia reworking of this text into contemporary sensibilities? Not only does the film self-reflexively perform the very process of adaptation but by 'destructuring' – or dislocating – the text into images, it also creates a visual vocabulary articula...
Whatever else subjects are, they are actors caught up an indefinite number of intersecting perfor... more Whatever else subjects are, they are actors caught up an indefinite number of intersecting performances. This is as evident in the workings of literary texts as it is in the dramas of everyday life. Indeed, the issue of subjectivity as performance in literary texts addresses fundamental semiotic issues pertaining to how literary texts work. None are more fundamental than these three: how do we as readers no less than authors make meaning from signs, how do we relate literary texts to the various worlds in which they are—or simply might be—located, and how do our various modes of engagement with literary texts affect the ways we make meaning in what is often called the life-world? At the outset I will provide a working definition of subjectivity, a manifestly protean term, crafted specifically for the task at hand, which is to explore the relationship in literary texts between subjectivity and performativity. I will then turn to a detailed examination of the various ways in which sub...
Thinking with Diagrams, 2016
Diagrams and diagrammatic representations in the form of notes, tables, schemata, graphs, drawing... more Diagrams and diagrammatic representations in the form of notes, tables, schemata, graphs, drawing and maps pervade scientific and knowledge production. This book explores the role of diagrams in cognitive processes such as experimenting, problem solving, making a choice or orienting oneself in mental of geographical space, demonstrating the extent to which the diagram serves as the semiotic basis of human cognition.
Iconic Investigations, 2013
One of the salient characteristics of Modernism, particularly of its early phases, is a new and d... more One of the salient characteristics of Modernism, particularly of its early phases, is a new and different attitude towards the visual aspects of literary texts. Poets like E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams begin to exploit the visuality of their texts as an additional, important means of expression – often by means of iconicity. Both use mainly diagrammatic iconicity with isomorphic function but in different ways. Many of the texts concerned, particularly in the case of Cummings, are visually ostentatious, striking or simply strange but recalcitrant to interpretation. The poetics both of Cummings and of Williams have strong affinities with Romantic ideas about the function of literature, and both poets share a particular interest in short-circuiting the vicissitudes of linguistic meaning-making.
The Motivated Sign, 2001
... 358 CHRISTINA LJUNGBERG Section " Onset" &a... more ... 358 CHRISTINA LJUNGBERG Section " Onset" " The Toxique" " Black Enamel" Narrator Tony Tony Charis Roz Tony Time Chapter 1991 1-1990 1960 " Weasel Nights" Charis " The Robber Bride" Roz " The Toxique" " Outcome" Tony Charis Roz Tony-Charis-Roz Tony 1991 ...
Maps are visual representations of territories. Like pictures, they can exist either on paper or ... more Maps are visual representations of territories. Like pictures, they can exist either on paper or similar material support or in people’s minds, as so-called mental maps. Cartosemiotics, the semiotics of maps, has therefore interdisciplinary connections with both cartography and cognitive science. Situated between the semiotics of pictures, mental representation, and the semiotics of codes, cartosemiotics belongs to the general field of Applied Semiotics: since maps usually contain written language and are signs encoded by certain cartographic conventions, they also need to be decoded. This combination of graphic and verbal elements makes them complex semiotic systems. Like pictures, maps represent surfaces and space through a two-dimensional medium. Since maps are two-dimensional media, they can represent space much better than words, which have to be pronounced in a linear sequence. At the same time, maps make use of an elaborate system of symbols to locate or describe geographical loci. Cartographic representations are usually provided with a legend to facilitate the interpretation of its signs
According to C.S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic s... more According to C.S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic signs to their dynamical objects. But what is the basis of resemblance or similarity itself and how is the phenomenon of iconicity generated? How does it function in cultural practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated (say, e.g., the cartographical procedures by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented)? To what extent are they themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings and the impetus for re-mappings)? With examples from texts by as e.g. Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald and Reif Larsen, I will argue that literary texts provide us with unique resources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimension of iconicity in the complex interaction among icon, index and symbols as a prerequisite for semiosis, the generation of signs.
Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2020
Anette Almgren Whites avhandling Intermedial Narration i den Fotolyriska Bilderboken: Jean Claude... more Anette Almgren Whites avhandling Intermedial Narration i den Fotolyriska Bilderboken: Jean Claude Arnault, Katarina Frostensson och Rut Hillarp (2011) är ett originellt och värdefullt bidrag till forskningen om samläsning av dikt och fotografisk bild i bokform om vad hon kallar "fotolyrik". Avhandlingen som består av två delar är väl skriven, väl disponerad och väl dokumenterad, om än fördelningen mellan teori och praktik är något ojämn. Den första teoretiska delen på 85 sidor utgörs av presentationen av bakgrund, det av författaren valda perspektivet samt hennes intermediala modell som sedan tillämpas i analysens 220 sidor. Den har en väl utbyggd käll-och litteraturförteckning såväl som bildförteckning, med en utmärkt fotnotsapparat och personregister. Ett sakregister hade emellertid underlättat läsningen.
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Papers by christina ljungberg