Wendy Wheeler

• PhD, DLitt.
• Professor Emeritus at London Metropolitan University

Biosemiotics and Culture. Special issue Introduction by special issue editors Wendy Wheeler and Louise Westling. Contributors: Donald Favareau, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, John Deely, Søren Brier, Terrence Deacon.

In this interview, Wendy Wheeler, London Metropolitan University Emerita Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry, discusses her thoughts on biosemiotics and its relevance for ethics. In Wheeler’s perspective, biosemiotics can ground ethics because it offers an alternative and fitting ontology of relations. She shares her thoughts on Pe...

This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question ‘Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?’. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdi...

Wendy Wheeler formulates a history and theory of biosemiotic and proto-biosemiotic thinking in order to open up new possibilities of contemporary social, philosophical, aesthetic and technological engagement. This is essential reading for those interested in these groundbreaking new developments, and is relevant to the environmental humanities, soc...

This essay explores the roots of semiological structuralism in Roman Jakobson's use of a model drawn from the developmental biology of Karl Ernst von Baer and the non-Darwinian evolutionary theory which von Baer helped to initiate. Drawing on the work of the French Slavicist linguist Patrick Seriot, the essay indicates the influence on Jakobson bot...

This lecture is divided into three main sections. The first part discusses the von Uexküllian umwelt and Funktionskreis; the second concerns Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic, and the growth of signs and meanings; and the last explores the biosemiotic idea of poiesis-particularly in relation to culture and literature. The first two sections will lo...

This essay discusses the semiotic scaffolding of modern science, the roots of which lie in the Protestant Reformation and the latter’s repudiation of the “semiotics of nature” upon which medieval theology depended. Taking the fourteenth-century battles between realism and nominalism as the semiotic scaffolding of the Reformation which was subsequen...

A Connoisseur of Magical Coincidences: Chance, Creativity and Poiesis from a Biosemiotic Perspective Abstract Semiotics, in the guise of the limited Saussurean semiology, has been widely used in the humanities and in cultural studies for the past 20 to 30 years at least. With the advent, nearly 20 years ago, of the environmental humanities, includi...

This article/book chapter addresses the question - early posed by Gregory Bateson - of ecology of mind. It does so by using the theme of natural and cultural metaphor as that can be seen to arise in the work of British novelist A.S. Byatt, especially in her 1992 work, consisting of two linked novellas, Angels and Insects.

Tom Tyler's Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers is playful philosophy with a serious purpose. One imagines from his book's pragmaticist arguments that Tyler would dispute that there is any other meaningful kind. It joins that now rapidly growing field of animal studies which is a part of thinking beyond the human-centred which Cary Wolfe's Posthuma...

These trees shall be my books.And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character – As You Like It, Act 3, scene ii.Biosemiotics and Natural Constructivism.During the nineteenth century, the idea of a natural oikos, an economy of natural being and relationship, gave rise to the invention, by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, of the term “ecology.” Despite its evide...

This article argues that organisms, defined by a semi-permeable membrane or skin separating organism from environment, are (must be) semiotically alert responders to environments (both Innenwelt and Umwelt). As organisms and environments complexify over time, so, necessarily, does semiotic responsiveness, or ‘semiotic freedom’. In complex environme...

Drawing on biosemiotic theory and the Peircean idea of 'abduction', I shall propose the idea of a layered structure of bio / semiotic evolution, in which human knowledge is systemic and recursive - and thus emergent both from what is forgotten and from earlier evolutionary strata. I will argue that abductions are those processes by which we move cr...

HIS ESSAY IS CONCERNED NOT SO MUCH WITH ecological imagery in literature as with how we might account for the fact of literature—or, more precisely, the strange processes of literary creativity—from an ecologically-informed point of view. If this project seems to be an ambitious one, I should say that it is already an implicit part of a general bio...

This ground-breaking synthesis of evolutionary and cultural theory draws on theories of complex adaptive systems and biosemiotics in order to argue that - far from being opposed to nature - culture is the way that nature has evolved in human beings. Wendy Wheeler's argument is that these evolutionary processes reveal the fundamental sociality of hu...

Theory - textualism and historicism: texts and history the challenge of textualism - shades of the prison house contexts - history and histories. Interrogations: ideology, myth, history - the literature of the Titanic disaster poetic engagements - struggles and retrenchments the novelist as historiographer - histories about history trivial pursuits...

In this essay we argue for a privileged relationship between the imaginary structure of the theatrical event and the imaginary structure of human subjectivity. We will examine in detail three examples of the considerable body of recent British drama which has been expressly concerned with political issues, in the light of Laplanche and Pontalis’s w...