B8821 - Semiotics of Cultural Heritage: Landscapes, Museums and Urban Spaces (1) (LM

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, the student will have learned to look at cultural heritage from a critical perspective, as a discursive object and as a semiotic process. By combining analytical tools from narrative-discursive, cultural and spatial semiotics, the student will acquire tools that enable him/her to critically analyze urban spaces, landscapes and museums as places of expression of cultural heritage.

Course contents

The course aims to define a semiotic perspective for the study of Cultural Heritage and its processes of construction, translation, negotiation, and transmission. From the viewpoint of discourse semiotics and cultural semiotics, Cultural Heritage will be considered as a semiotic construct located at the intersection of multiple discursive domains and oriented toward the production of a shared mnemonic landscape, yet marked by internal tensions and fault lines that make it a site of confrontation between different axiologies and cosmologies. Particular attention will be devoted to urban space as a privileged setting of Cultural Heritage and to the so-called dissonant heritage.

Readings/Bibliography

Suggested readings:

Lotman, Y. (1990) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Indiana University Press.

Assmann, A (2011) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives. 

Violi, P., Demaria, C. (Eds.) (2023) Reading Memory Sites Through Signs. Hiding into landscape, Amsterdam University Press.

Macdonald, S. (2009) Difficult Heritage. Negoziating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Routledge (Introduction, pp. 1-24)

Tunbridge, J.E.; Ashworth, G.J. (1996) Dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict. J. Wiley, 1996 (Chapter 1-2)

Smith, L. (2006) Uses of Heritage. Routledge. [chapters 1 & 2]

Gottdiener, Lagopoulos (1986) The City and the sign : an introduction to urban semiotics

Bellentani, Panico, Yoka (2024) Semiotic Approaches to Urban Space: Signs and Cities, Edward Elgar.

A selection of relevant semiotic writings will be provided by the teacher and uploaded in Virtuale.

Teaching methods

Frontal lectures and class discussions/presentations.

Assessment methods

Oral exam aimed at assessing the competence of the student in discussing the main theory of cultural heritage studies applying semiotic approaches and categories.

Teaching tools

Multimedial equipment of the lecture room. Slides and other teaching materials.

Office hours

See the website of Francesco Mazzucchelli