SEMIOTICS

Tartu - Moscow Semiotics School

 University of Baghdad ■
Collage of Education for Women ■
English Department ■
Tartu - Moscow Semiotics School ■

By Fatima Abud AL Khaleq –

In 1960s semiotics born out of cybernetics and
information theory. USSR ( Soviet union) supported
development in linguistics .Yuri Lotman’s associate
lgor Cernov connects Moscow and Estonian
intellectuals – Estonian interest in Structuralism
,alongside Tartu support for Russian Studies ,makes
. such crossover easy
The Tartu- Moscow school of semiotics was
formed when a various group of scholars
joined informally from 1950s to 1980s to
provide alternative to the regnant Soviet
approaches to language, literature and
.culture
Their work develops the linguistics of Saussure,
elaborated by Trubetzkoi and Hjelmslev . They
subsequently came to treat art works and other cultural
artifacts as the products of ‘Secondary modelling systems
‘ , means as elements arranged according to rules that
could be seen as language- like and hence accessible to
.analysis by the procedures of structuralist linguistics
Opoyaz, the Moscow Linguistic Circle and Prague
Linguistic Circle the predecessors of TMS The group shared
an interest in Russian formalists and in contemporary
linguistics, semiotics and cybernetics. During the 1970s
prominent members of the group, such as IU. M .Lotman
and B.A Uspebskii,turned from more theoretical and
formalized work to historical studies of culture as a system
. of semiotics systems
Lotman : The alumni of Moscow University
and Leningard University formed the Soviet
school of semiotics as a synthesis of these
two traditions in the humanities. To them, a
third tradition was added : the University of
. Tartu . It was not a mere chance
Theses on the semiotics study of cultures ( as
applied to Slavic texts)
Consisting of nine theses, the manifesto Theses on the
semiotics study of cultures (as applied to Slavic texts)
liad the foundation for the semiotics of culture and
represents a milestones in the legacy of the Tartu-
.Moscow
The first two theses describe the research
program of the semiotics of culture, and the
third through to the nine describe various
considerations and concepts relevant to
culture and its study through the use of the
. text as an analytical tool