《符號帝國》：重讀東方∕異文化 (II-II)
Date Issued
2004-07-31
Date
2004-07-31
Author(s)
DOI
922411H002109
Abstract
This project “Empire of Signs: Re-reading Barthes’ Reading of Japan”
tries to re-read and reconfigure the construction of Japan as an empire of
signs in Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs(1970) with the following two
theoretical approaches: the imagination of the oriental other and the
intertextuality between culture and literary text. Empire of Signs is
written after Roland Barthes’ visit to Japan in 1966. This project explores
Barthes’ reading and misreading of Japanese culture, and his appropriation
of the imagination of this oriental other in Empire of Signs.
This project focuses on the analysis of Barthes’ “reading” of Japan in
the following two aspects: (1) how Barthes as a gazing subject dealt with
his travel experience and his confrontation with Japanese culture, and (2)
how Barthes appropriated this “reading” in Empire of Signs and made it
into a critique of the concept of the West and its logocentrism. The focus
of this study is on the analysis of how this imagined Japan as an empire of
signs, as an utopian imagination of the oriental other (the imagined sign
system “Japan” as the representative of the oriental other), becomes the
tool that Barthes used to reflect and criticize the West and the Western
culture—the logocentric and the ideological thinking behind the
signification of the Western formulation and interpretation of the sign
system. And it is because of these very attitudes and premises of the
modernist aesthetics and semiotics, Barthes’ textualization of Japan
becomes not just an empty sign system, but an empire without its historical,
political, and ideological background.
Subjects
Roland Barthes
Empire of Signs
Japan
intertextuality
sign system
modernism
Publisher
臺北市：國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所
Type
report
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