The 9th Annual Lotman Conference

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THE SYMBOL IN THE CULTURAL SYSTEM

The Estonian Semiotics Repository Foundation is holding the 9th Lotman conference at Tallinn University, 26-28 May 2017.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Eero Tarasti (University of Helsinki), Boris Gasparov (Columbia University in the City of New York), Irina Shevelenko (University of Wysconsin in Madison).

The programme of the conference can be found .

The year 2017 marks the 90th birth anniversary of Zara Mints and the 95th birth anniversary of Juri Lotman, as well as the 30th anniversary of the publication of the 21st volume of the periodical Sign System Studies, entitled “The Symbol in the Cultural System“. The 9th Lotman days are dedicated to these significant dates in the history of semiotics.      

Every semiotic system aims to have its own definition of a symbol. Every system “knows what `its symbol` is and needs one for the working of its semiotic structure,“ Juri Lotman writes in the programmatic article, which gave the name to the volume mentioned above, as well as to our projected conference. The “semantic potentials of the symbol are always greater than any realization of them“, which makes symbols “important mechanisms of cultural memory, Lotman argues“. The article is available in English, in Universe of the Mind, ch 7 (transl. Ann Shukman, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001).

The conference is intended as a continuation of the scholarly conversation, initiated 30 years ago. Significantly, among the plenary speakers there is the linguist, semiotician and musicologist Boris Gasparov, once a member of the Tartu-Moscow school, and the semiotician and musicologist Eero Tarasti, professor at the University of Helsinki. Irina Shevelenko, the third plenary speaker, was a student of Zara Mints and will follow up her professor‘s central research topics, discussing the currents in the scholarship of Russian modernism during the last 50 years, as well as the possible trajectories of their future development.           

The topics discussed at the conference include, but are not limited to the following:
  • the problem of symbol in the humanities 
  • the symbol in the ideological and historical narrative 
  • symbol and social memory 
  • symbol in visual arts and literature 
  • symbol as a device in rhetorics 
  • symbol and myth
  • symbol and ritual 
  • cultural contexts of Russian modernism and experimental poetics               
  • symbolism in literature and art 
  • biography and work of Zara Mints and Juri Lotman 

Organizing Committee of the 9th Lotman conference at Tallinn University:

Rein Raud (chair), Marina Akimova, Boris Egorov, Tatjana Kuzovkina, Mihhail Lotman, Vadim Parsamov, Piret Peiker

More information: