• Eco, Riffaterre, and a poem by Baudelaire
    Semiotica 2024 (257): 103-123. 2024.
    In Eco’s work between around 1960 and 1992, “openness” in a modern literary text can mean (a) “permitting more than one interpretation,” and (b) “requiring a good deal of decoding work from the reader,” which is close to my own position. These two aspects of openness are demonstrated using Baudelaire’s Les Chats, in regard to which Eco denies that the text may be cristallin in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, while still requiring constructive effort from the reader. It is apparent that this term is equiva…Read more
  •  3
    The identification of 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance in the UK
    with William J. Sutherland, Susan Armstrong-Brown, Paul R. Armsworth, Brereton Tom, Jonathan Brickland, Colin D. Campbell, Daniel E. Chamberlain, Andrew I. Cooke, Nicholas K. Dulvy, Nicholas R. Dusic, Martin Fitton, Robert P. Freckleton, H. Charles J. Godfray, Nick Grout, H. John Harvey, Colin Hedley, Neil B. Kift, Jeff Kirby, William E. Kunin, David W. Macdonald, Brian Marker, Marc Naura, Andrew R. Neale, Tom Oliver, Dan Osborn, Andrew S. Pullin, Matthew E. A. Shardlow, David A. Showler, Paul L. Smith, Richard J. Smithers, Jean-Luc Solandt, Jonathan Spencer, Chris J. Spray, Chris D. Thomas, Jim Thompson, Sarah E. Webb, Derek W. Yalden, and Andrew R. Watkinson
    Journal of Applied Ecology 43 (4): 617-627. 2006.
    1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used a…Read more
  •  18
    ‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
    Semiotica 2007 (166): 279-330. 2007.
    Abstract This overview of Michael Riffaterre’s work in poetics aims to trace the development of the key concepts of Semiotics of Poetry (R.1978), from his initial ‘stylistics’ phase, moving through the subsequent New Criticism and Piagetian structuralist phases. There is an account of the debate with Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss over a valid method for interpreting a Baudelaire sonnet, in the course of which several elements of the mature theory are developed. These are treated in detail in the f…Read more
  •  5
    In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that a modern poetic text is d…Read more
  •  11
    The Cultured Landscape: Designing the Environment in the 21st Century
    with Sheila Harvey and Ken Fieldhouse
    Taylor & Francis. 2005.
    A team of eminent practitioners and writers contribute to an assessment of the philosophy of landscape, and collectively form a new approach to creative design.
  •  8
    This essay assesses Quentin Meillassoux’s numerological approach to Mallarmé’s problematic but formally innovative poem “Un Coup de dés,” using a semiotic methodology to reveal the deficiencies of that approach from the viewpoint of literary theory. Section 1 describes my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of the structure of modern poetry. Poems are generated by two underlying propositions, each of which governs the structure of a set of symbolic images on the textual surf…Read more
  •  8
    Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 185-200