Language in context seminar

Speaker: Professor Jamin Pelkey

Title: Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream in Context: A Semiotic Discourse Analysis

Abstract: In a famous story, Zhuangzi the sage wakes up from a vivid dream only to find himself lost—in-between worlds of possibility—and ultimately transformed. The vignette may be well-known, but its broader historical, sociolinguistic, and structural-interpretive contexts have been neglected and are poorly understood. Like so many other ancient texts, the broader chapter is composed in a concentric pattern, a text-level chiasm with sections in each half mirroring each other throughout while the central sections provide a pivotal peak and interpretive key that radiate meaning back out to the margins. To quote anthropologist Mary Douglas, “the meaning is in the middle”. The middle is also the place of Peircean “Thirdness”. In this lecture I map out the chiastic structures of Zhuangzi’s Qíwùlùn 齊物論chapter, tracing in the process its various intimations of Peircean semiotic pragmatism—from fallibilism and continuity to the triadic structure of inductive inquiry. Referencing cultural and historical contexts and recent scholarship on Zhuangzi and Peirce alike, I ultimately argue that this ancient text, like the pragmatist philosophy of language and meaning it foreshadows, can only be adequately appreciated by paying attention to the in-between—the interplay of opposites in relation.

About the speaker: Dr Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University and a core member of the Ryerson-York graduate program in Communication & Culture. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from La Trobe University, and his areas of specialization include Linguistic Anthropology, Embodied Cognition, Tibeto-Burman Linguistics, Historical Linguistics and Semiotics. His recent research has focused on language evolution and embodied cognition, leading to the publication of his book The Semiotics of X (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).