Marcel Danesi

The end of the freedom to smoke in public places in most western countries has been a boon to those of us who hate coming home in the evening smelling like an ashtray, but of course we know that it's created frustration for nicotine addicts and financial difficulties for people who run bars, kiosks, and small shops. But how many of us spare a thought for the poor old semioticians, left out on a limb after building their academic careers on painstaking studies of the meaning of smoking show more gestures, or elaborate deconstructions of the subtexts in cigarette advertising? You don't see any bars with a roped-off "semiotics area" outside the back door, do you...? Life has clearly been tough for many of them, forcing them to branch out into ephemeral and unproductive fields like emoji and cat-memes. Perhaps we should think of taking up a collection for them...

Using an imaginary dating couple, Ted and Cheryl — both of whom smoke like chimneys — for purposes of illustration, Danesi takes us reasonably briskly and painlessly through some of the main fields of study semiotics deals with: the cultural meanings tucked up in gesture and body-language, in dress and grooming, in language (with separate chapters on metaphor and narrative), in spaces, in the arts, in objects, and in popular culture. Jargon is kept to a minimum, whilst the history of ideas in each field is sketched out without going very deeply into the inevitable debates and disagreements. As it says on the tin, this is just an introduction, designed to give you an idea of what semiotics is and the sorts of things it works with. In this third edition, Danesi has taken account of new cultural phenomena like selfies, memes and emoji, but he doesn't seem to have pruned out things from earlier editions that have proved to be ephemeral (remember Pet Rocks and Cabbage-Patch dolls?).

The pace and the range of things covered means that the book sometimes comes across as a little slapdash, when he rushes into a subject and tries to summarise it in two or three pages. Thus, in the chapter on metaphor, he has the ardent lover Ted say “Your kisses are sweeter than wine, Cheryl,” and proceeds to examine this statement as though it's a straightforward association of the notions of sweetness and lovemaking, when of course it's really a phrase that Danesi (growing up in Canada in the fifties) has got from Pete Seeger, who adapted it from the Song of Songs. It's unlikely, after all, that the wine Ted and Cheryl were drinking on their date would have been sweet enough to provoke that particular comparison, unless it was meant ironically ("Your mouth tastes like the inside of a wine barrel, Cheryl."). Semiotics is all about being aware of that kind of cultural history, and it undermines what Danesi is trying to do if he elides it in his hurry to get to the end of the chapter. He gets into similar trouble in his chapter on clothing when he sees the modern business suit as the revenge of "Cromwell's descendants", the Puritans, for the Restoration. You can maybe get away with that sort of thing in a lecture, but if you're going to do it on paper, at least read the Wikipedia article on the English Civil War...

Readable and fun, but doesn't inspire much confidence. show less

It is an Orwellian wet dream of epic proportions, but The Art of the Lie is also one of those books which chillingly forewarns against the state's appropriation of language and effectively communication to disenfranchise human individuality-the fount of all civic powers. Well worth a read though the intermingling of simple language and academic jargon makes it a foray into headache territory at times.

My review of the cool skeleton book should make it clear that non-narrative nonfiction isn't really my cup of tea. But I keep trying, because that's what readers do.

This was actually one of the first manuscripts I worked on at Palgrave. I arrived right in time for the end-of-year crunch, so I was helping editors and EAs on a bunch of lists--though in this case I was only doing formatting and looking out for lyrics, poetry, and block quotes. I hadn't leveled up to permissions checking quite show more yet. Anyway, I read a few sentences here and there and thought it looked interesting, and then I found this copy on the take shelf and thought I'd check it out. This book published simultaneously in hardback and paperback, which means that it was/is targeted toward a more general audience than strictly researchers, academics, and upper-level grad students. In other words, I could understand it.

It will seem contradictory, but I won't actually say too much about the content--I'm a bit nervous about leaving a substantial review of a book from my own company, even if it's not a book from my list and was published several years ago. So I'll just say three things:

1. I found the first chapter, in which Danesi lays out his thesis, the most interesting part of the book. It had never occurred to me that the mouth to mouth kiss might be a relatively recent phenomenon--and I've been wondering what romance pre-1200s was like ever since.

2. A lot of the books and movies Danesi cited that I'd read and seen were just...very wrong. Plot points, timelines, and emotions were incorrect in ways that hampered Danesi's argument, and two Disney movies were actually mixed up with each other. Disclaimer: I can sometimes remember plots unusually well and I have won Disney Scene-It the only two times I've played. But still. This is an academic book. Research. (2.5 things: One of the author's surveys involved less than 50 people. Seriously. (To be fair, the economics and finance books I acquire are more likely to be more scientific than humanities and social sciences. But I have published books complaining that they're still not scientific enough, either.))

3. This book would have seriously benefited from some beta readers, if not coauthors or contributors, in other departments. Particularly women's studies. There were a few sentences that smelled strongly of MRA. show less

The Curious History of the Riddle by Marcel Danesi is a fun and educational read. The fun lies in the riddles themselves as much as the history while the education is the connecting of things we may have known into a coherent history.

We are all familiar with riddles, in fact it appears they are as much a part of being human as anything else. Yet in contemporary times we usually think of them as a form of humor, something akin to jokes, and thus of moderate serious merit. Yet even while show more thinking this most of us know at least a few of the historical roots of the riddle. This book will take those scattered facts about the riddle, bring them together, and make a history that shows the value throughout time of riddles and similar metaphorical thought.

While this is a quick trip through history with the riddle as our connective thread, this never gets bogged down. There are plenty of citations if a specific period is of interest but Danesi skims across the eras so that this history remains informative and fun rather than getting too pedantic.

I highly recommend this for lovers of history, especially those who enjoy learning the history of things we know fairly well but perhaps not as well as we think. There is something here for everyone, whether you love or dread riddles.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less