Article: Las Fantasmagorías de Robertson en Madrid (1821) y la historia natural del signo

Francisco Javier Frutos Esteban and Carmen López San Segundo, project members of the Research Team at Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, have published their article “Las Fantasmagorías de Robertson en Madrid (1821) y la historia natural del signo” (“Robertson’s Phantasmagoria in Madrid (1821) and the Natural History of the Sign” in the Journal Revista Signa 25 (2016), pp. 555-572. Signa is published by the Spanish Society for Semiotics, the Asociación Española de Semiótica.

Although phantasmagoria established a specific way of organizing audiovisual discourse and served to consolidate the magic lantern as a medium for social communication, it has often been forgotten as an object of scientific study by the sectoral histories of the communication media, the plastic arts and the stage arts. With the aim of overcoming this conceptual lack of definition, or in other words, to try to endow it with the cultural relevance it deserves, Francisco Javier Frutos Esteban and Carmen López San Segundo make an attempt to explore phantasmagoria as an instrumental mediation, in the sense that this concept is understood in the historical-cultural approach, to then be able to assimilate it to the context of a ‘natural history of the sign’ in the terms posited by L.S. Vygotsky.

The full article will be soon available free of charge online at http://revistas.uned.es/index.php/signa/ and http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/signa.vol25.2016.16948