Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect

Abstract

The study of literatures beyond national borders is associated with the mythological school and Indo-European linguistics. The impulse behind this was the observation of striking similarities at the most varied levels between texts that until then had not been assumed to have anything in common. After that, all the researchers working in the schools that followed—the school of “borrowings,” the cultural-historical school, Nikolai Marr’s stage school, and others—dedicated their efforts to addressing the same question: explaining the similarity of names, motifs, plotlines, and images in works of culturally and historically distant literatures, mythologies, and folk poetry traditions.

Originally published as “K postroeniiu teorii vzaimodeitsviia kul’tur (semiotitcheskii aspekt),” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta (= Trudy po romano-germanskoi filologii: literaturovedenie) 646, 1983: 92–113. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 603–614. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000.