“Semiotic Reflections on Ideology, Representation, and Genres” (2025)

Intentio Auctoris and Self-Writing

Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Text, Genres, and Representations, 2018

The chapter deals with the problem of the author and the self in autobiographical writing with respect to Foucault’s practice of subjectivization of discourse. Autobiography is a form of writing in which the self of the writer de nomine manifests itself mostly through interconnection between the empirical author, whose signature is attached to the work, and the implied author, whom we encounter in the work. However, this authority is only imaginary since an autobiographical depiction of life is selective. It means that the self is not given; it is a result of constant reading and writing, which constitute our “own” identity and allow us to share “our” view of the world with others. It is obvious that this has more in common with what is considered art or experience than with classic scientific knowledge. Objections that this statement may raise can be refuted by the fact that philosophy was developed as an art or a skill (technique) of appropriation of fragmentary discourse, having the form of self-care already in ancient polis. As we see, these reflections have brought us closer to the attitude that Foucault held in the early 1980s, when he tried to create the subject from the conditions of its existence and a diary, a letter and other forms of self-writing represented different signs of the subjectivization of discourse.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS IN SEMIOTICS: TEXTS, GENRES AND REPRESENTATIONS, 2018

This unique book, inspired by the work of Umberto Eco - one of the greatest semioticians of all times - provides a compelling overview of current developments in semiotic research, bringing together various academic voices and critical reflections on the nature and function of signs, signification, and communication. Contributors, including Eco himself, discuss the status quo of the discipline, its scope, theoretical orientations, and methodological approaches, shedding light on the cognitive and philosophical complexity of the meaning-making process and form–meaning interfaces. The book is an outcome of the SIVO Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s keynote address during his visit at the University of Łódź in 2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres, and Representations, published by Peter Lang.

From Semiology of Everyday Life: Video Lifestreaming Practices as a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare

Current Perspectives in Semiotics. Texts, Genres, and Representations, 2018

The notion of lifestreaming was coined in the 90s by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter. The term refers to documenting one's own life with help of all possible testimonies such as a diary, blog, photos, videos and every other textual, graphical, or acoustic message one can produce. This idea got a new dimension with the proliferation of new media such as the Internet and pocket video cameras held in hand, integrated into a mobile phone, a laptop, a tablet, attached to a helmet, a car windscreen, or a flying drone. In this chapter a phenomenon of video lifestreaming will be analyzed with the methodology inspired by Umberto Eco's semiology of everyday life. The term was employed by translators of Eco's essays, Piotr Salwa and Joanna Ugniewska, who collected Eco's texts from the time span of 40 years and published them in a book with such a title. The common perspective of these texts was the focus on phenomena from mass culture and everyday life, and applying to it a methodology of semiology. In an essay "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", Umberto Eco revisits McLuhan's concept "medium is the message", proposing an idea of semiological guerrilla whose intervention starts at the last stage of information flow. The chapter will show both emancipating and oppressive potential of personal video lifestreaming practices and try to answer a question of whether such practices can serve as an element of a modern semiological guerrilla warfare.

Mariavita Cambria 1984 : Antigon-izing the Irish stage

2018

The paper explores three versions of Antigone staged in Ireland in 1984: Antigone: The Riot Act by Tom Paulin; Antigone: a version by Brendan Kennelly and Antigone by Carl Aidan Mathews. Rewriting, adapting or translating classics can represent a counterdiscoursive strategy used in crucial moment of a country’s history. In the three Irish plays Antigone’s persona springs out of the confrontation/opposition with both Creon (the institutional opponent) and Ismene (a sort of Antigone’s double). In the framework of Ireland as a postcolonial context, the paper investigates how this confrontation/opposition fits in Irish politics in the 80s.

The Posthuman and Irish Antigones: Rights, Revolt, Extinction

Clotho, 2022

Antigone’s afterlives in Ireland have always enacted critical gestures of social protest and mourning that expose the fundamental fragility of human rights caught up in the symbolic conflict between oppressors and oppressed. This paper seeks to explore the scope of rereading certain Irish figurations of Antigone – the exemplary text of European humanism – through a posthumanist lens that unveils new and radical understandings of modern injustices, legal fissures, and capitalist insinuations of an “inhuman politics” against proletarian minorities in twentieth-century Irish society in transnational contexts. The possibilities of a posthumanist theorization of Antigone at the intersection with gender, class, and human rights, reflect the connecting threads, political, aesthetic, and critical, between two texts: an early twentieth-century anonymous poem titled “The Prison Graves” dedicated to Irish human rights activist and revolutionary Roger Casement and an unpublished play-version of Antigone by Aidan C. Mathews in 1984, dedicated to René Girard. Written and produced as a critique of systematic institutional violence and neoliberal capitalist oppression during the epoch of the anti-revolutionary zeitgeist, the myth of Antigone shifts its dialectic from the nationalist nostalgia of “The Prison Graves” to the play-version of the Cold War era to reciprocate a counter-protest against the passing of the Irish Justice Bill. Antigone is reimagined as a hypochondriac resident of the slums of the proletariat and a member of a degenerate acting troupe. Her classical (mythical), aristocratic (white, European, Western) figure has become a posthuman commodity: a proletarian actor now, she performs the same role for millennia in a post-nuclear contaminated prison state in Thebes/Dublin. Peteokles is a bourgeois-turned-rebel mediary; Polyneikes is remembered as a communist terrorist who has been airbrushed from the records of the police state; a bibliophile Ismene religiously reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and the Chorus is the real state oppressor.

Memorable barbarities and national myths: Ancient Greek tragedy and Irish epic in modern Irish theatre

2008

graciously extended the hospitality of Notre Dame's O'Connell House to me on my numerous research trips to Dublin. The Christian Brothers of Bethlehem University in Palestine have opened their library to me over the past months as I have been preparing the final manuscript of my dissertation, and the awe-inspiring work that they do has reminded me why I went to graduate school in the first place. Heartfelt thanks to the members of my dissertation committee, Drs. Susan Cannon Harris, Mary Burgess-Smyth, Seamus Deane, and Luke Gibbons, for the splendid v example of their scholarship, and for the time and intellectual energy that they have devoted to this study. They have generously shared their insights, suggestions, and constructive criticism, all of which have been unfailingly penetrating and helpful. Whatever merits this study may possess testify to their commendable talents as teachers; the flaws that undoubtedly remain are solely my responsibility. A thousand and one additional thanks to Dr. Harris for the latitude she has allowed me in keeping not only this research project but also my entire graduate career in harmony with my most cherished priorities and interests, however unconventional. My father Timothy Hennessey, whose pride in his family's heritage inspired my interest in Irish literature, my mother Carol, my brother Tim, and my sister Elizabeth, have all been abidingly loving and supportive. Steve and Anne Steinbeiser and their entire extended family have moved and refreshed me with a constant stream of fervent prayers and enthusiastic endorsement. I am deeply honored to now call their family my own. The wry optimism and effervescent laughter of my fellow graduate students at Notre Dame, especially Julianne Bruneau and Somdutta Roy, have made everything more enjoyable (even dissertation writing). And last but absolutely not least, my husband Stephen Steinbeiser has been my staunchest advocate through these long years of writing and research. He has cheerfully adopted my interests in Irish theatre, proofread innumerable drafts, and restored my confidence and enthusiasm whenever I felt overwhelmed or unsure of how to proceed. His perceptions and insights have been invaluable, and his love and his faith in me unwavering. I could not have done this without him. 12 Richard Schechner provides a detailed analysis of this type of theoretical framework in Performance Theory (1988) and The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (1993); it has been productively utilized and revised by a diverse group of critics including Joseph Roach (Cities of the Dead, 1996), Roland Rollins (Ruin, Ritual, and Remembrance, 2001), and Anna McMullan and Brian Singleton (Performing Ireland, 2004). 13 The dates correspond to the first production of these plays at each theatre, not their publication; details of the latter can be found in the bibliography. 31 McDonald and Walton, xi. For a lengthier discussion of this phenomenon, see the introduction to Kelly Younger's Dionysus in Ireland (2001). 32 McDonald and Walton, xii-xiii. 33 Deane, "A Yeats Symposium," The Guardian, (Jan. 27, 1989), quoted in Younger, 6. 58 This controversy was no doubt central in the decision to stage Milligan's and Martyn's plays as well, but neither approaches the directness of Yeats' and Moore's intervention in the debate. 59 Cited in P.J. Mathews, 37. 60 "I know what folklore is," Atkinson is reported to have said at one point, "and I would not allow any daughter of mine to study it!" (Mathews, 39) 61 Mathews, 39-40.

Edited Volume: Theorising Performance

Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Czech public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2021

This paper focuses on Sinophobia which is usually not expressed openly in the public service media. The Sinophobia discourse intensified in 2020 in connection with the coverage of the pandemic. How are anti-Chinese attitudes expressed in the news discourse of the Czech Radio and Czech Television? Examples from a broader analysis of the representation of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic in news and journalism programmes are given. Inductive qualitative research methods (discourse and semiotic analysis) were used to detect subtle nuances of meaning and reveal implicit presuppositions. This study focuses on the manifestations of bias, e.g., the ideologically grounded attitudes of the speakers. The anti-Chinese statements (about poor hygiene habits and eating wild animals) were most often mentioned in connection with the origin of the coronavirus, vaccination, and China expansive policy. Sinophobic messages were built on the opposition of Us and Them, which is, according to van Dijk (2000), the core of new racism. In spite of the fact that the open hate speech and systematic bias (intentional implications, obvious evaluation or signposting) were not found in the researched sample, the analysis identified the presence of Sinophobic statements in both public service media.

COLLOQUY text theory critique

2006

Issue 11 of Colloquy: text theory critique is divided into two parts. The first part is a collection of papers on Sophocles' Antigone, while the second part consists of the usual general issue articles, reviews, and creative writing. The present issue would have been impossible without the generous contribution of the many referees who have reviewed articles prior to publication. The following issue of Colloquy will be the proceedings of the conference Be true to the earth, which took place at Monash University on March 31-April 1, 2005 and which was co-organized by Colloquy. The collection of papers, edited by Samantha Capon, Peter Coleman Barbara Ghattas and Kate Rigby, will largely focus on eco-criticism and eco-philosophy, and it will be published in November 2006. Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for Issue 12, a general issue to be published in May 2007. The deadline for Issue 12 is December 15, 2006. Academic articles, review articles, reviews, translations and creative writing will be considered.

The (d)evolution of political communication in Italy: Beppe Grillo’s case

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica, 2020

The article aims at analyzing the case of Beppe Grillo and his Five Stars Movement in terms of social, cultural and linguistic phenomenon that – initially as a virtual party without a structured organization – seems to conquer both right-wing and left-wing Italian citizens notwithstanding generational and ideological differences. The success of grillini (Grillo’s supporters) in the parliamentary election of 2018 as a consequence of Matteo Renzi’s constitutional referendum failure, represents a clear sign of the leadership crisis as well as the drifting apart of the ruling class that ignored the problems of ordinary people for several years. The analysis is focused on both form and content: on the one hand, the artistic expression characteristic of Grillo, his gestures, mimicry and direct language plenty of verbal hyperboles, rhetorical figures, swearwords and blasphemous obscenities that build his uncompromising charisma, on the other modern technologies and social media (including ...