Abstract
What motivates human beings to do the things they do? From ancient philosophy to modern-day psychology and sociobiology, no satisfactory answer to this question has ever emerged. A more manageable version of this question would be: What is the meaning of the things that human beings produce? That is the core query that guides the discipline of semiotics—the science of meaning. As a general framework of ontological inquiry, semiotic method suggests that to understand something enigmatic like the kiss, it is necessary to study it as a sign, that is, as something that stands for a range of meanings that connect it to other meaning structures in the network of signs that the Estonian semiotician, Yuri Lotman, called the semiosphere—the universe of signs in which the human mind is immersed.1
Rose is a rose is a rose.
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
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Notes
Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), call these forms appropriately metaforms.
An in-depth discussion of the history of sweets is the one by Tim Richardson, Sweets: A History of Candy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002).
As in the previous chapter, many of the facts on file cited here come from various sources, including William Cane, The Art of Kissing (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995);
Karen Harvey, The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005);
Andréa Dmirjian, Kissing: Everything You Wanted to Know about One of Life’s Sweetest Pleasures (London: Penguin, 2006);
and Lana Citron, A Compendium of Kisses: Facts, Quotes and Curiosities (New York: Harlequin, 2010).
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls (Ten Speed: Kindle edition, 2012)
See also Clyde R. Bulla, The Story of Valentine’s Day (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), p. 249.
Various accounts and discussions of the origins of Valentine’s can be found in Nancy J. Skarmess and Stacy Venturi-Pickett, The Story of Valentine’s Day (Nashville: Ideals Publications, 1999);
Bulla, The Story of Valentine’s Day; and Natalie M. Rosinsky, Valentine’s Day (Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2003).
Joanne Harris, Chocolat (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt, 1983).
Guillaume de Lorrie and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Hogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Marilyn Yalom, How the French Invented Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
See Annette Stott, “Floral Femininity: A Pictorial Definition,” American Art 6 (1992): 60–77.
See Sheril Kirshenbaum, The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us (New York: Grand Central, 2011), pp. 12–14.
Diane Ackerman, Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 145.
See James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World (New York: Crown, 2000).
See, for example, Ingemar Nordgren, The Well Spring of the Goths: About the Gothic Peoples in the Nordic Countries and on the Continent (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2004), pp. 191–193.
For a discussion of the origins and meanings of love knots, see Charlotte Bingham, The Love Knot (London: Random House, 2000).
See Jules Cashford, The Moon: Myth and Image (London: Cassell, 2002).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).
A discussion of various marriage rituals throughout time can be found in Ethel Lucy Urlin, A Short History of Marriage: Marriage Rites, Customs, and Folklore in Many Countries and All Ages (State Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1990)
and George P. Monger, Marriage Customs of the World: From Henna to Honeymoons (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004).
Discussions of the legends attached to the mistletoe kiss can be found in Betty Neels, The Mistletoe Kiss (New York: Harlequin, 1998).
For theories about the origins of the Valentine’s card, see Robert Brenner, Valentine Treasury: A Century of Valentine Cards (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Company, 1999).
See on this point various writings in Michael Allen and Valery Rees, Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
A good discussion of the Dracula myth in the modern world is the one by Matthew Beresford, From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
See Linda Sonntag, Seduction through the Ages (London: Octopus, 2001), pp. 120–124.
A good collection of studies on the Twilight phenomenon is the one edited by Giselle Liza Anatol, Bringing Light to Twilight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Gregory L. Reece, Creature of the Night (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 95.
See Montague Summers, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend (Minneola, NY: Dover, 1933).
See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage 1989).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).
Carl Jung, Aspects of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 65.
Willem Frijhoff, “The Kiss Sacred and Profane: Reflections on a Cross-Cultural Confrontation,” in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 230.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Collier, 1912), p. 12.
Georges Bataille, L’erotisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
Christopher Nyrop and William Frederick Harvey, The Kiss and Its History (London: Sands and Company, 1901).
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Danesi, M. (2013). The Kiss in Symbol, Ritual, and Myth. In: The History of the Kiss!. Semiotics and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376855_2
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