Semiotics Texts

Just in case you’ve been living down a rabbit hole yourself, these two classic stories are about a young girl named Alice who experiences all kinds of surreal encounters in a fantasy world. In Lo...

In each of these stories, the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes solves a case by which everyone else is totally baffled. After having been presented with all the available facts, Holmes picks up...

Following a plane crash at the start of the novel, a group of schoolboys finds itself stranded on a desert island. With no adults in sight, the boys must find a way to not only attract help but to...

As we’ve seen, semiotics has paid more and more attention to cultural issues and power relations, in some cases takes up Marxist critique. Animal Farm is a classic fictional take on this sub...

Gothic horror, psychological turmoil, and poor home decor are the order of the day in this Victorian short story. The story begins with the narrator chronicling her thoughts as she spends her days...

This poem begins, “I’m a riddle in nine syllables” and it’s made up of nine lines that each consist of, yep, nine syllables. As we can gather from the title, the poem is chock-full of metap...

Some poems have titles that are vague and make you wonder what to expect from the poem itself (“Metaphors,” for example). Not this one—the title of Stevens’ poem tells us exactly what to ex...

One of the most famous satirical works of all time, Gulliver’s Travels is narrated by an explorer and anthropologist who visits all sorts of strange lands and gives us a rundown of their cus...

1977: Roland Barthes, Elements of SemiologyBarthes wrote lots of great stuff that could be included here (Mythologies is definitely worth checking out); still, as far as semiotics goes, you ca...

1994: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and SimulationWant a side order of philosophy with your semiotics? If so, then Baudrillard’s your man. In this book, Baudrillard outlines the concept of simulati...

2004: Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The BasicsLet’s get real: if you’re just getting into semiotics then you won’t want to dive headfirst into some of the more complex stuff. What you need is a...

1981: Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, DeconstructionWhile semiotics and structuralism started out as best buds, Culler suggests that, forget these two, it’s deconstr...

1979: Umberto Eco, A Theory of SemioticsUnlike the thinkers behind some early structuralist works, Eco recognizes that signs are dynamic rather than unchanging, and that we need to take account of...

2003: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live ByIn this book, Lakoff and Johnson show that we don’t just talk, but also think in metaphors. We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money...

1991: Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic By Charles Sanders PeirceAs a philosopher, scientist, logician, and mathematician, Peirce was a major brainbox and wrote some pre...

1916: Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General LinguisticsTechnically, this book wasn’t written by Saussure himself: it’s made up of notes collected by students during Saussure’s lectures at...

1983: Kaja Silverman, The Subject of SemioticsThis book brings together semiotics and psychoanalysis—which, if you think about it, is a pretty good combo. After all, Freud’s analysis of dreams...