Semiotics of Friendship - An Encyclopedic Approach

A friend should be able to be an attentive listener, which made semiotician Roland Barthes wonder in his intriguing dictionary of love, "cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?". This volume takes on the encyclopedic task - in the sense of Umberto Eco, where an encyclopedia is a very complex sign - to explore friendship in detail, not only as a form of love but in all its complexity as a bond that connects people and forms communities. Semiotics, the study of signs and meaning-making, is used alongside insights from a wide range of friendship studies to create a far-reaching intellectual resonance, or sonority, around friendship as a central human experience.

As a study of the significance of friendship, it presents findings from friendship research across the globe, enabling new ways of thinking about friends. It includes:

• key concepts from semiotics, sociology, anthropology, and other fields, briefly explained
• major models of friendship from antiquity to contemporary societies
• proverbs and sayings about friendship from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe
• stories about famous or forgotten friends from mythology, fiction, and real history
• summaries of research on friendship from selected academic disciplines
• bibliographical references for further studies

Report

(...) "what makes the experience of reading the volume so deeply intellectually satisfying is, indeed, the way that the oblique "encyclopedic" method allows these seemingly disparate, but actually extraordinarily well-chosen, entries to be creatively correlated together to result in gratifyingly new insights into the rich, multifaceted phenomenon of "friendship". In this way, the volume should appeal deeply to lay readers and academics alike."

Donald Favareau, National University of Singapore

Product details

• Authors: Claus Emmeche
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 10.02.2025
• EAN: 9783111422855
• ISBN: 978-3-11-142285-5
• No. of pages: 562
• Weight: 951 g
• Illustrations: 2 b/w tbl.
• Series: Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC]
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Englisch, Semiotik und Semiologie, Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften, Liebe und Freundschaft, Love and Friendship, Communication Studies, SOC000000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / General, Semiotics / semiology, General studies, Friends and Enemies, Semiotik der Freundschaft, Knowledge and friendship, Communication in Friendship, Wissen und Freundschaft, Kommunikation in Freundschaft, Freunde und Feinde, Semiotics of Friendship, Friendship Proverbs