THE SHIRLEY AND LESLIE
PORTER CHAIR OF SEMIOTICS
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The SHIRLEY AND
LESLIE PORTER CHAIR OF SEMIOTICS AND THEORY OF LITERATURE was founded 1990.
Professor Itamar Even-Zohar was
nominated as Chair incumbent and served until October 31, 2009. Professor Zohar Shavit was nominated in November of 2009 to be the Chair’s
incumbent. The Chair was renamed The Porter Chair of Semiotics and
Culture Research on November 2009. |
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Chair’s Activity until
October 31, 2009
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The Chair has supported research
carried out by Professor Itamar Even-Zohar and by his PhD and M.A students. |
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Basically, the ongoing project of
Professor Itamar Even-Zohar has been the investigation of the factors
governing the dynamics of heterogeneous socio-cultural systems. “Culture” in
this conceptual framework is conceived of as life-management programs, not as
sets of elite commodities. |
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Even-Zohar’s
research has been predominantly directed to investigating the instances of
deliberate culture planning in relation to the emergence, or rather the
making of, new socio-political entities. Problems of majority and
minority, center and periphery, which have always been part of the
theoretical framework of Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory, have now been put to test in
connection with the study of the ongoing struggles for accessing and
eventually controlling resources. Since the end of the 18th
century, more and more communities and groups around the globe have adopted
the model of self-management, more often than not bundled together with
energetic endeavors to create separate culture repertoires. |
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This research has been carried out by
the Chair incumbent first on the invented Hebrew culture in Palestine between
1882 and 1948. He then moved to investigating the case of Italy’s Risorgimento
and the “revival” of the Italian language. Other cases had to be
subsequently studied, in various degrees of depth, in order to be able to
assess the validity of conclusions based on locally restricted cases. Since
1993, the Chair incumbent has been carrying out research in situ in
Spanish Galicia, Catalonia, Iceland, Québec, and Newfoundland. In the course of research, questions
naturally diversified, not only because each case is evidently different as
far as the local interaction between the generally used functions is
concerned, but because what seemed to be the major parameters at a certain
stage often turned out to be governed by other, probably more crucial and
decisive ones. |
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As a consequence, the problems of
culture planning and the making of entities in the context of the interplay
between center and periphery have gradually geared themselves to questions about
the relation between survival and success of communities, and the role of the
various groups within such communities who may operate as factors of either
generating wealth (in the wide sense of the term, not exclusively on the
economic level) or failure. Groups traditionally called “intellectuals” and
“intelligentsia” may indeed function, as research has shown, in either one of
these directions. On the other hand, it has been tentatively possible to
hypothesize that communities severely lacking this category of people have
shown little to no capacity for change and improvement of life conditions. |
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Parts of the work done in these
fields can be accessed from Even-Zohar’s Website: http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez. |
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Research works carried out by PhD and
M.A students under the supervision of Professor Even-Zohar are listed in http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/ez_vita/ma-phd.htm. |