1. knowledge and understanding

The course aims to provide students with basic knowledge of the fundamentals of communication and the structure of semiotic and signification processes. The aim of the course is to provide students with an overview of the main semiotic approaches, from a historical and theoretical perspective and with the help of case studies and practical analyses. The course aims in particular to develop basic skills in the analysis of texts and cultural products through a semiotic methodology. The construction of a semiotic method will enable all students, at the end of the course, to possess a set of tools to be able to observe, analysing and describing different communicative and cultural phenomena from the point of view of their 'meaning'.

2. applying knowledge and understanding

Ability to link, connect and compare different positions in an articulated theoretical debate

3. learning skills

Development of analytical, synthesis and rhetorical argumentation skills to defend theses and counter them, based on appropriate philosophical methodology and rhetorical techniques.

Lectures, brainstorming and classroom exercises.

1. The semiotic view
2. Semiotics and everyday life
3. Making sense of the world
4. How semiotics works
5. Signs and words
6. Constructing meaning
7. Textual production as a set of choices
8. The enunciation in semiotics
9. Structural semiotics and Interpretative semiotics 
10. The visual domain and the aesthetic text
11. The text as a “assemblage” 
12. Semiotics and Society
13. Reading and interpreting a text: Eco and the encyclopaedia
14. Interpreting, negotiating, remembering: how semiotics studies cultures as texts

Texts:

M. P. Pozzato, Capire la semiotica, Roma, Carocci, 2013, pp. 172.

E. Grillo, Semiotica dell’investigazione, Roma, Carocci, 2014, pp. 110 (excluding the chapter IV)

U. Eco, Lector in Fabula. La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi, Milano, La Nave di Teseo, 2020(first edition, Milano, Bompiani, 1979), cap. I-VII (162 pp.)

Other texts may be provided through the Studium platform.

Please remember that in compliance with art 171 L22.04.1941, n. 633 and its amendments, it is illegal to copy entire books or journals, only 15% of their content can be copied.

For further information on sanctions and regulations concerning photocopying please refer to the regulations on copyright (Linee Guida sulla Gestione dei Diritti d’Autore) provided by AIDRO - Associazione Italiana per i Diritti di Riproduzione delle opere dell’ingegno (the Italian Association on Copyright).

All the books listed in the programs can be consulted in the Library.