Cultural Poetics: A New Perspective of the Studies on Lotman

Abstract: Lotman is the founder and epitome of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, and is one of the major representatives of the Russian semiotics. Throughout the 50 years of his academic career, his academic development route witnessed his academic tendency from literary history to structural poetics and finally to cultural poetics. The poetic paradigm he constructed takes language as its base, text as its representation, and culture as its aim, which has brought a Copernican revolution to literary research. Not only does Lotman’s cultural poetics endow literary research with broad cultural horizons, but it also fully maintains researchers’ subjectivity and strengthens the literary aesthetic sense, thus avoiding the tendency of pan-cultural philosophy and anthropology that is too far away from literature and too abstract. A full interpretation and deep discussion of his cultural poetics, after all, will provide a new perspective for the studies on Lotman in China.

Keywords: Lotman; cultural poetics; typological method; explosion; binary opposition

Mingming Yang: School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

*Corresponding author, Rong Zou: School of Foreign Languages & Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China