Lotman in an interdisciplinary context: A symposium held at the University of Michigan
Lotman in an interdisciplinary context: A symposium held at the University of Michigan

Summary/Abstract: A symposium The Works of Iurii Lotman in an Interdisciplinary Context: Impact and Applicability has been held at the University of Michigan, USA, on October29, 1999. The premise of the conference was to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who have used Lotman in their work and who could reflect on the ways in which Lotman enriches (or, sometimes, fails to enrich) their discipline, as currently practiced in the United States. The conference organizers, Jeremy Shine and the author of these lines, deliberately sought to invite scholars who had had no personal contact with Lotman, be it as colleagues or students. The emphasis was placed on the late works of Lotman, such as Universe of the Mind and Culture and Explosion, those in which Lotman attempts to go beyond the de Saussurian foundations ofhis semiotics. The implicit agenda of the conference, ultimately, was to reclaim some parts of Lotman's works that had not been sufficiently heeded in American academia and that could contribute to a kind of mapping out of the field of post-structuralist Cultural Studies and its various sub-branches. In a paper called "Bipolar disorders: The semiotics of asymmetry in Lotman, Bakhtin, and Levinas", Amy Mandelker proposed a reading of Lotman's Culture and Explosion in the context of theories of otherness inspired by neo-Kantianism and twentieth-century Jewish philosophy (Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Emmanuel Levinas).

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