Sandy Flitterman-Lewis

(Co-authored with Robert Stam and Robert Burgoyne)

New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond

Routledge, 1992

New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics provides a comprehensive lexicon of semiotic concepts, defining over 500 critical terms.  The authors address key aspects of contemporary semiotic and cultural debate--for example Metz's semiotics, Genette's narratology, the feminism of Mary Ann Doane, and Bakhtinian concepts. The book explores linguistically-oriented terminology in cinema studies; the semiotics of film narrative; the psycho-semiology of the cinema; and intertextuality, discourse, and transtextuality. References to individual films drawn from the work of a wide range of directors including Orson Welles, D.W. Griffiths, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Cocteau, and Chantal Akerman illustrate the concepts under discussion.  Although especially geared to the needs of film students, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics is an impressive guide that will be useful for scholars in all areas of the arts, philosophy, and literature where an awareness of semiotic terminology and methodology has become indispensible to serious theoretical work.