Social Semiotics As Praxis

In Social Semiotics as Praxis, Paul J. Thibault rescues semiotics from terminal formalism by recognizing that the object of a semiotic inquiry is necessarily the way in which human beings, individually and collectively, make sense of their lives.  Focusing on Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, he develops a conception of social semiotics that is a form of both social action and political praxis.   Thibault’s principal intellectual sources are, among others, Bakhtin, Volosinov, Derrida, Foucault,