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Winfried Nöth. Handbuch der Semiotik. J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 3-476-00580-1. 560 pp.
Any area of study tends to boost its respectability in the eyes of academic colleagues and the public as textbooks and anthologies of readings multiply, and to acquire reassuringly sharper definition in proportion to the proliferation of works of reference. Introductions to semiotics began to mushroom about a decade ago, piloted by Umberto Eco's Theory (first English edition in 1976). Over the past few months, three complementary books of readings-two of them excellent-have appeared in English alone, each set of selections with a different ambition and focus, and each catering to segments of a readership with disparate tastes.
On the other hand, semiotics has hitherto suffered from a veritable famine of works of reference. True, as far back as 1961, Tomas Maldonádo published a lexicon, in German, but this contained fewer than one hundred terms in the compass of a mere twenty-one pages. Next, in 1973, the Wörterbuch der Semiotik of Max Bense and Elisabeth Walther appeared, but this was consigned to all but exclusively Peirce's semiotic. Afterwards, other lexicons were to surface in various Western languages, the most aspiring among them being the one by A. J. Greimas and J. Courtès, Sémiotique; dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (French 1979 and 1986; English 1982). This idiosyncratic compilation has been judged, for instance by Cesare Segre, as "far from being a survey of the terminology in use in semiotics. . . . "
At last, an Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, consisting of about 1,600 pages in three volumes, prepared in collaboration by a stellar array of contributors from various parts of the globe, is about to issue forth in the Fall of 1986, in Berlin (initially in English). Another substantial volume, The Semiotic Sphere, has just come out in New York; it surveys, country by country, the state of the art in each. Further, plans are currently afoot to produce a major Handbuch der Semiotik ("about the sign-theoretic foundations of nature and culture"), under the leadership of Roland Posner, a distinguished West German semiotician. Intended for publication in 1988, this manual is to consist of approximately seventy articles, and to be a Gemeinschaftswerk, produced by some fifty scholars in concert.
Peirce-without whose...