Ma Dakang马大康

Swiss linguist, founder of modern structural linguistics; his sign = signifier + signified underlies twentieth-century semiotics.

American philosopher and founder of semiotics; his triadic sign (representamen–object–interpretant) and "unlimited semiosis" recur throughout Ma's work.

French linguist at the Collège de France; theorist of enunciation and subjectivity in language.

Russian philosopher of language and literature; dialogism, the utterance, and the ideological sign.

French semiotician and critic; mythologies, the work/text distinction, and the codes of narrative.

Italian semiotician at the University of Bologna; theorist of the "open work" and interpretive cooperation.

American semiotician at Indiana University; modeling-systems theory, a key reference point for Ma's notion of "modeling."

American philosopher at UC Berkeley; speech-act theory and the construction of social/institutional reality.

American cognitive linguist at UC Berkeley; embodiment and conceptual metaphor, central to cognitive semiotics.

German reception theorist at the University of Konstanz; the implied reader and literary anthropology.

Russian Formalist; his “defamiliarization” (ostranenie) and “art as device” are central to Ma’s account of poetic language and the functional structure of literature.

Polish phenomenologist; his “many-layered” literary work, “polyphonic harmony,” and concretization recur throughout Ma’s aesthetics.

German theorist of reception aesthetics; his “horizon of expectation” and historical connectedness inform Ma’s reading of reception and literary history.

German dramatist and Marxist theorist; his “alienation effect” (Verfremdung) and epic theatre are discussed at length in Ma’s work on defamiliarization.

Frankfurt School philosopher and aesthetician; his account of art’s distance from and critique of reality is engaged in Ma’s writing on Western Marxist aesthetics.

Frankfurt School philosopher; his aesthetic utopia and “new sensibility” are taken up in Ma’s discussion of Western Marxist aesthetics.

Critic associated with the Frankfurt School; his “cult value” and theory of the work of art in the age of reproduction resonate with Ma’s account of the cultural ecology of literature.

Russian-American linguist; his model of the six functions of language and the “poetic function” underpin Ma’s analysis of poeticity and literariness.

British Marxist literary theorist; his account of literariness as a historically variable relation, not an essence, is engaged in Ma’s work on fiction and poetic language.

German philosopher of hermeneutics; his “fusion of horizons” and historically effected understanding inform Ma’s construction of a Chinese literary hermeneutics.

Canadian literary theorist; his archetypal and myth criticism is taken up in Ma’s discussion of literature, ritual, and the mythic imagination.

Franco-Bulgarian structuralist theorist; his poetics and critique of criticism are cited in Ma’s account of the conversion of poetic language.

French critical theorist; his simulacrum, hyperreality, and implosion are central to Ma’s account of literature’s cultural ecology in the age of electronic media.