Text-creation in the light of literary semiotics

Abstract

The article analyzes the features of a literary work using the semiotic approach to the text as a cultural construct with its own specific structure, semantic meaning and pragmatic function. It is found out that structuralists view a literary text outside the cultural context, in isolation, taking into account only its structural elements functioning within a particular language system. Poststructuralists analyze a literary work through a variety of cultural codes that affect not only the structure of the text itself, but also its perception by readers. The article pinpoints semiotics as a scientific approach to a holistic study of the literary process, which involves the study of three vectors of the text (semantic, syntactic, pragmatic). It is determined that the semantic aspect of a literary text can be clarified in the formal and content planes, on the level of connotation, metaphor, word play. There have been considered different approaches to the interpretation of the rhetorical means – figures and tropes – that determine the semantic aspect of the study of the text. The analysis of the syntactic aspect of a literary work provides the study of its structural elements at the level of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. A holistic study of a literary work as an element of cultural communication is also realized though the pragmatic function of the text taking into account the figure of the reader. In the process of defining pragmatic features, receptive aesthetics (W. Iser, H.R. Jauss) highlights a special role of the reader of a literary work, as in the process of reading there is a merging of two “horizons of expectation” – author’s and reader’s.