Hortus Semioticus is an online journal for the semiotic research of a new generation. The goals of the journal - to publish student research - imply many of the things that gardens are about: freshness, growth, blooming and cultivation. The driving force behind the journal is curiosity and the joy of inquiry, as its authors have yet to switch on their academic autopilots: there are only a few things that are considered as common sense. This is what distinguishes Hortus Semioticus from its more traditional academic counterparts, and it is our hope that the seeds of student research serve to enrich the semiotic landscape with new topics and fields of research, provide new articulations and to widen, perhaps, also its scope.


» Hortus Semioticus 1 (2006)
Semiotics of the Own and the Alien.

» Hortus Semioticus 2 (2007)
Possibilities of preiconographic intuition by Anti Saar

» Hortus Semioticus 3 (2008)
Intermediality and Storytelling
 

Collected and edited by: Tuuli Raudla and Leene Korp

The first issue of Hortus Semioticus is a collection of essays originally prepared for a course on the semiotics of the own and the alien . The essays cover a wide and diverse range of topics, yet they all address, in one way or another, the emergence of the distinction between the own and the alien and the ways it is maintained; throughout the papers, the necessity, conventionality and interpretation of the emergent boundaries are discussed. The authors of the papers you will find in this collection are mostly students of the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Many of them do not yet have an established field of research and thus the choice of specific topics was often driven by curiosity and intuition rather than by pre-established assumptions. Yet because of this it is all the more interesting to observe where the terminology of the semiotics of the own and the alien has proven to be fruitful.

Contents:
Alo Joosepson
Julia Kristeva: Strangers to Ourselves [Abstract]
Riin Magnus
Adolf Portmann and archetypes: quasi-semiotics, crypto-semiotics or not semiotics at all ? [Abstract]
Priit Põhjala
How natural is natural language ? [Abstract]
Jens Haug
Self-time: A cultural semiotic study [Abstract]
Andres Kurismaa
Alienation of thoughts in psychopathology [Abstract]
Leene Korp
Body as a boundary of self and nonself [Abstract]
Maarja Saldre
Where do the dreams come from ? [Abstract]
Tuuli Raudla
The doll: between familiarity and obscurity [Abstract]
Kristin Vaik
Which name is closest to the self ? [Abstract]
Jüri-Franciscus Lotman
The biography as culture's attempt to acquire the writer's creation [Abstract]
Katre Väli
To remember dreams and reality is to exist [Abstract]
Eva Lepik
The hero and the author: "The Bride's Veil" by Karl Ristikivi in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin's "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" [Abstract]
Mari Bleive
About self and other in the genre of travelogue: Jaan Kaplinski's Spring on Two Coasts or a Sentimental Journey to America [Abstract]
Pille Kruus
Locating Brecht - translating cultures [Abstract]
Maris Saar
At the border of the Own and the Alien: the questions of defining oneself. Tõnu Õnnepalu's Border State [Abstract]
Tanel Pern
Texts of Daniil Harms in Mehis Heinsaar's play Artur and Paul [Abstract]
Tiina Põllu
The semiotic aspect of self and other in the prose of Victor Pelevin [Abstract]
Kristjan Jaak Kangur
How Other becomes Self through the historical spider-web [Abstract]
Randy Peiker
Tammsaare or Tuglas ? [Abstract]
Katre Kikas
The relationship between the own and the alien in the formation of the Estonian nation: Hans Anton Schults trying to define self and nationality [Abstract]
Anu Haamer
Contacts between "self" and "other" in old Estonian folk beliefs and Christianity [Abstract]
Renata Sõukand
The 'own' and the 'alien' in Estonian herbal ethnomedicine: Chamomile and arnica [Abstract]
Ulla Kattai
Setos - the conceptions of identity [Abstracts]
Georg Brinkmann
Aposematic signals as distinctors of the self and the other in predator-prey communication [Abstract]
Terje Meisterson, Johannes Tralla
"Ecological" consumption - a new excuse for buying [Abstract]
Tiit Kuuskmäe
Self and Other: Walls from the point of view of the semiotics of boundary [Abstract]
Ivar Leemet
Self and Other: the logic of the Jewish question in Christianity [Abstract]
Veronika Bohl
Ideologie und Semiotik: Über die Aufnahme des Denkmales von Lihula in der deutschsprachigen Presse [Abstract]