“‘I am a Living Sign’. A Semiotic Reading of Morrissey”

This article investigates the complex artistic experience of the British singer Morrissey from his early years with Manchester pop band The Smiths (1982–1987) up to his solo years (1988 and beyond), focussing on the artist’s capacity for engaging in complex dialogues with writers, film directors, and other cultural icons and texts from contemporary pop(ular) culture. In order to read Morrissey as a living sign and a living text—whose meaning is constructed in dialogical interactions with other signs and texts—this analysis relies on different semiotic approaches and categories such as Bakhtinian dialogism and carnival, (cultural) iconicity, intertextuality, and cultural (and intersemiotic) translation theory.