Italian Semiotics of Memory

Genealogies and Current Perspectives

Abstract

The article gives an overview of the development – in Italian semiotic research of the last fifteen years – of a semiotics of memory, as a specific subfield of a semiot­ics of culture. After a brief account of how memory has usually been defined in the dif­ferent semiotic traditions (generative, interpretive and, above all, cultural), and after a focus on Eco’s theorisation on memory (and its parallels with Aleida Assmann), the arti­cle presents some recent semiotic studies on the subject in Italy – mainly, but not exclu­sively, in the context of a research centre at the University of Bologna (TraMe), dedicat­ed since 2009 to the study of memory from a semiotic and interdisciplinary perspective. Memory (especially cultural memory) has also been a relevant field of investigation for several Italian semiotic scholars that have explored different aspects related to a semi­otic approach to cultural memory.