The Sign and Its Masters

This book is a reprinting of the second collection (originally dated 1979) from among Thomas Sebeok's essays on general semiotics and some of its applications. In the first half of the book are essays that confront a postulated separation between nature and culture, which, for the past half-century or so, has had the force almost of dogma. In Part II, Sebeok writes about the Masters, such luminaries in the field of semiotic inquiry as John Lotz and Roman Jakobson. Sebeok asserts that the semiotic mainstream has so far been unnecessarily and counterproductively split into two traditions, one scientific, philosophical, and "major," the other literary, glottal, and "minor." In The Sign and Its Masters, Volume VIII in the Sources in Semiotics Series, Sebeok's vision is presented with characteristic brilliance.