A Receding Temporal Horizon: Semiotic Dialogues of the late 20th Century Between Eastern Europe and the West

About the Book

Receding Temporal Horizon analyses Eastern Europe's societies, histories and traditions, too frequently reduced to trivialized images in the Western cultural imaginary. It testifies to the distinctive social experiences of thinkers that pivotally reshaped key 20th-century semiotics, explaining how meaning and value are collectively constructed by hinging on the horizon of time. Fernee and Bogdanov's semiotic study begins with the Renaissance, which led to the bifurcation of Eastern and Western Europe into dual semiotic realms. The authors analyse Eastern European thinkers like Koyre, Bakhtin, Todorov and Kristeva, whose semiotic works challenge Western assumptions about universal experience. They also examine three significant 20th-century meaning and value production theories: structuralism, pragmatism and poststructuralism. The reassessment concludes with Yuri Lotman's vision of the Renaissance as centring a multi-sided Bakhtinian individual. Challenging cultural studies assumptions about a homogeneous and logical modernism spreading from the West to the world, they expose a double consciousness where "cross-fertilisation" is the germinal force in all cultural growth.