Lotman's Cultural Symbols Poetic Theory

Since the latter half of the 20th century, the literary studies have turned to the cultural studies, and the cultural poetics has become a new trend of the contemporary literary theories. Lotman is one of the most famous literary and cultural semioticians in the 20th century, and Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics has become the herald and leading direction of the western cultural poetics. The profound thought and unique approaches of Lotman's theory of the cultural semiotic poetics are inspiring for the literary and cultural studies in the new century. Based on careful reading and study of Lotman's works written in Russian, as well as Chinese and foreign research data about him, my dissertation is aimed to elucidate thoroughly Lotman's ideology of cultural semiotic poetics and the characteristics of evolution of his theoretical system in the cultural context, and to expound that Lotman's ideology of the cultural semiotic poetics enjoys peculiar position in the world academic history, exerts far-reaching influence, and provides us inspiration.The dissertation starts from two main aspects of Lotman's theory --- external learning environment and inherent theory system, follows the development of his cultural semiotic ideology, and integrates organically his cultural semiotic poetics with "text" as its center concept, studies gradually Lotman's literary semiotic theory to his cultural semiotic theory, for the purpose of getting through the inherent theoretical system of Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics theory, and constructing a solid bridge between the literary studies and the cultural studies. The dissertation is concerned about Lotman's art-text theory, cultural text theory, and deep study of two fundamental categories of Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics and his film semiotics, and on the basis of theory research reading criticism on text is carried out. The studies on existence form of Lotman's art-text, circumstance-text, myth-text, film-semiotics theory, the communication models, the dynamics of culture, cultural memory, belong to the blank space in the research in China, and nobody set foot. This dissertation mainly consists of six chapters; apart from the content the foreword, concluding remarks, appendix and so on.Chapter One goes to Lotman's life course and author's writing in a chronological order. Combined historical study with theory, Lotman's learning career is divided into four stages, and is combed in a detailed way, in order to show his academic research background, characteristics of times and total scene, and announcing to the inherent evolution logic of his thought objectively. The dissertation thinks Lotman's cultural semiotic theory does not separate from his literary semiotic theory, In fact, these two always mutually cross the border, talk to each other, constitutes the overall style of Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics together.Chapter Two with comparative method moves towards the relationship of Loman with Modern Semiotics, Structuralism, Russia Formalism, and Bakhtin, combed meticulously and studied comparatively the theoretical origins of Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics, and pointed out his theory has exceeded to the prehominid further. The dissertation thinks that Lotman's theory of the cultural semiotic poetics not only has inherited Saussure's tradition of structuralism linguistics, but also initiative has absorbed Pierce's semiotic theory cream, and has come true to exceed two big semiotic tradition in Europe and America. Lotman's theory of the cultural semiotic poetics absorbs various modern theories, and has a lot of place of communicating with the structuralism, it has become a big upper indispensable study school of modern semiotics history in the world because of the superiority and peculiarity of mimics method having exceeded the structuralism, so just looking on Lotman as a structuralist is insufficient.The third chapter mainly studies the existence form, structures and meaning-generating mechanism, construction principles, of art-text as a semiotic system. We think that Lotman's literary semiotic theory is one kind of modern cultural theories, attaching importance to the structures and forms of text, and society history culture context. Lotman's art text theory does not chase author out, not treat reader with indifference, and not chop off history culture blood vessel absolutely with the context, does look on them as a organic overall system, opens up cultural vast space for the production of text's significance. Therefore, his literary semiotic theory has exceeded coeval theory of literature and art of Europe and America, it maybe exactly the root reason that Lotman's theory is fashionable in the west.The fourth chapter deals with Lotman's cultural semiotics and the inherent cultural development, semiotic thought, the generating mechanism of texts; and two communication models, the dynamic models of culture, cultural memory, cultural space by the means of semiotics, and the analysis of the art-text problem of Lotman's cultural semiotic theory and the serviceability of Lotman's cultural semiotic theory to the literary studies. From the angle of cultural semiotics, Lotman rebuilds the cultural communication models basing on the traditional cultural theories. Two kinds of communication models break the prehominid's theory defect, and find a logic existence space for cultural difference and creative individuality. At the same time, with the semiotics method of the categorical opposite binary contradiction, Lotman has revealed out the inherent mechanism of the culture development. Lotman's description to the cultural dynamic system provides beneficial enlightenments for us to rethink the problems of the tradition history culture studies and a new visual angle to research the current situation of our nowadays culture.The fifth chapter contributes to two fundamental categories of Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics——text and semiosphere, and further point their characteristics, function and the position in Lotman's theory.The sixth chapter deals with Lotman's film-semiotic theory mainly, Lotman's viewpoint about film language, narrative styles, time and space in film, significance generation of film text and so on. It points out Lotman's film-semiotic theory is the practice and development of his cultural semiotic poetics theory.Lotman's cultural semiotic poetics theory both has the rationalism color of the modern science, and contains the anti-rationalism color of the postmodernism. I believed that, this has the direct relations with Lotman's understanding about the concept of text. In my opinion, Lotman's view on text in his literary semiotic theory mainly demonstrates the structuralism style and characteristic, but in his cultural semiotic study the view on text has the more poststructuralism characteristic. This also reflects Lotman's ideology change in his semiotic study: transition from a structuralism to a poststructuralism. But the question can't simplify like this, because the above conclusion only is a roughly trend of Lotman's theory, exactly said, Lotman's text view reflects the profound thought tendency of the cultural semiotic poetics.