Literary Semiotics Research Articles

Musical semeiotic: a Peircean perspective

Much of the literature of musical semiotics has been based on the theories of Saussure, and thus been language-dominated. This has resulted in a stress on the signified, which can be seen in the topic theory of Leonard Ratner and Kofi Agawu. In the theory of C.S. Peirce the triad of sign, object and interpretant cannot be broken down; the sign is not a sign unless it is interpreted. Thus semeiosis is a dynamic process. The Ground (which is not equivalent to the sign vehicle), the Object, which is public, shared and prior to the sign, and the Interpretant, which is classified as Immediate, Dynamic or Final, may each be interpreted in musical terms.

Abduction: A Theory of Visual Interpretation

Peirce's notion of abductive reasoning provides a theoretical framework in which to analyze visual interpretation, that is, how viewers understand a visual and interpret its meaning. This paper demonstrates that a different kind of interpretive logic operates for visual communication processes than for language-based communication processes, and this logic is best articulated in the semiotic literature where the notion of interpretation is more carefully conceptualized.

Literary semiotics in Spain: Bibliography

Literary semiotics in Spain: Bibliography

The Visual Turn in Poetry: Nominalistic Contributions to Literary Semiotics, Exemplified by the Case of Concrete Poetry

LL OF US-literary historians and others-who are interested in concrete poetry sooner or later have to face the problems of identifying, characterizing, or defining this genre. Whenever scholars and poets, during the past three decades, have attempted to establish comprehensive account of the concrete poetry movement and its poetic products, they have confronted what turned out to be very complicated affair. In 1971, the German poet Reinhard D6hl listed three aspects of the concrete poetry movement as responsible for such complications. First, the international dispersal of the movement has resulted in wide regional differences. Second, its partly underground existence severely hampers retrospective view. Third, all theorizing on concrete poetry is frustrated by the existence of a multiplicity of unclarities and differences, not only of terminological nature.' The first two of these problems mentioned by Dohl are addressed by large number of anthologies and monographs;2 the third one will be my primary concern. I will argue that some fairly widely accepted opinions on the status

Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System ed. by Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir

but also of critical ideas. This book does no more than adumbrate such issues. Having read Kreiswirth’s study most readers are likely to be some­ what better acquainted with Faulkner’s early works than they were before reading it, but they are not likely to be led to a reappraisal of those works nor of the essential quality of his genius and its emergence. s h y a m a l bagchee / University of Alberta Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System, eds. Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983). x, 158. $17.95 This is a significant collection of essays in the brief history of Canadian criticism because it marks an effort on the part of the editors to shift the ground of critical practice from New Criticism to a Structuralist poetics or literary semiotics. Invoking a Todorovian poetics in their introduction, Grace and Weir argue that the nine essays gathered here share a concern with understanding the systems and semiotic processes that make Atwood’s texts possible, and among these operative systems it is the dialectical relationship between parole (individual text) and langue (the system of Atwood’s oeuvre) that collectively receives the greatest emphasis. Using a different methodology, each of the essays “dismantles” the system of the text(s) in order to discover and examine the different dominating nodes in the Atwood infrastructure, and “what emerges from such a collective investigation,” the editors argue, “is a sense of the coherence of a system still in process and the elegant simplicity of its structure” (ix). Such an orientation situates the texts under discussion and the discussions themselves in “Atwood.” But, except for a declarative eschewing of the biographical function of author, a temptation which everyone in the col­ lection but George Woodcock refuses, it is not clear in what capacity “At­ wood” functions. As a residual humanist source of the text, a self-sufficient individual given prior to the text? As implied author? As scriptor? As an effect of the text, an inferred enunciating agent, a metonymic characteriza­ tion of the text? For despite an announced emphasis on the text as an intertextual construct and on the semiotic function of the writer rather than the biographical function of the author, not everyone writing here consistently sees the text as a product of writing. Framed by the editors’ own contributions, the essays are arranged in a “ telescoping movement from single to multiple perspectives” (ix). Weir’s concluding essay, for example, “Atwood in a Landscape,” opens Atwood’s 368 system out through a series of hermeneutic reflections on certain problem­ atic areas of Atwood’s textual landscape: topography (toposf graphein) in several senses or human territoriality and the violence of writing which “imposes a humanist valorization upon the world” (144) ; the sacred space of the Australian aboriginal peoples’ “dream-time” called Alcheringa, the possibility of experiencing “ the fundamental unity of the ground of being” (145); Heidegger’s striving of Earth/World as it is embedded in Atwood’s “ dual apprehension of the earth-dwelling of the work of art and the earthaffirmation of the unitary cosmology” (147) ; Julian Jayne’s theory of the bicameral mind; and finally a Heideggerian notion of building/dwelling/ communitas. Grace’s introductory essay, “Articulating the ‘Space Between’ : Atwood’s Untold Stories and Fresh Beginnings,” is equally interesting because in its contextualizing strategy it implicitly recognizes that discourse is not only linguistically determined in that it follows the laws of its own material nature, but also situationally determined as a signifying practice in which the sign is a social act. The text speaks, and in doing so it assumes and inscribes the concrete relationship to the other that constitutes the internal structure of signifying. Meaning is thus not totally inherent in discourse and its structure, despite Derida’s argument about the graphematic proper­ ties of language that assure the release of meaning beyond the writer’s control, but contextual or situational, a function of the pragmatic situation in which the discourse occurs, though, as Derrida also says, no context is ever “ absolutely determinable.” 1 Meaning is, as Ross Chambers has argued, “precisely the perception of a relationship between discourse and...

Poetics from psychoanalysis to cognitive psychology

Psychopoetics is, by definition, a multi-disciplinary venture: first in its need to consider the various subfields and schools of psychology and semiotics - including the study of literary discourses; second in its need to make use of a variety of methodologies in order to deal effectively with those diverse goals and disciplines. The present overview relates psychoanalysis - historically, the predominant psychological approach of literary scholars - to poetics (or literary semiotics) and suggests that psychoanalysts and poeticians, because of a natural distrust for the anti-mentalistic bias of behaviorist psychology, have been show in taking full advantage of the pro-mentalistic, process-oriented views of cognitive scientists in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. The first part of this overview, ‘Freudianism versus Psychoanalysis: A Historical Survey’, is divided into seven sections: Beyond Freud; Ego psychology; Object relations theory; Self psyvhology; The impact of Jacques Lacan; Psychoanalysis and contemporary psychology; Stages of Cognitive and psychosexual development in psychology and psychoanalysis. The second part on ‘Psychology and Poetics' considers two classic alternatives: the choice between a structural and a functional view of literature and the status of the text between author and reader. The last two sections consider the contributions of experimental poetics, German-language poetics, and artificial intelligence to a psychologically based theory of texts.

The state of literary semiotics: 1983

The state of literary semiotics: 1983

Jakobsonian Theory and Literary Semiotics: Toward a Generative Typology of the Text

Jakobsonian Theory and Literary Semiotics: Toward a Generative Typology of the Text

Conceptions of folklore in the development of literary semiotics

Conceptions of folklore in the development of literary semiotics

Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith

When it comes to narrative, God knows there's enough to keep the most diversified interests busy, as the Chicago narrative symposium demonstrated. My own interest-which fate has decided to call narratological-focuses on the question, What is narrative per se? What properties must a text have to be called a narrative, and what properties disqualify it? Realizing the difficulty of the question and the importance of bringing a broad range of experience to bear on it, I invited readers of my Story and Discourse to cross-examine a theory based on an amalgam of AngloAmerican narrative study (James, Lubbock, and Booth) and Russian and French literary semiotics. A number of scholars have accepted the invitation. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's spirited Versions, Narrative Theories (Critical Inquiry 7 [Autumn 1980]: 213-36) is the latest examination and the one most in need of reply, since it strikes at the heart of the theory and beyond at basic tenets of linguistics and semiotics as we know them.

Trends in West German Literary Semiotics: Preliminary Sketch

About 3,000 researchers from all over world attended first International Congress on Semiotics in Milan in June, 1974. If countries of Eastern bloc had not imposed such strict limitations on travel, many more well-known semioticians could have been expected. The variety of program was bewildering. Umberto Eco said in his closing remarks, [...] during these six days we have spoken about semiotics. Therefore exists. At colloquium on in Berlin in October, 1975 (Posner & Reinecke, 1977), which had been arranged by handful of German semioticians in Milan, about sixty of several hundred participants were willing to take part in section on semiotics, although very few of them had published anything in this field (cf. Eschbach & Rader, 1976). Thus, does exist, just like itself, but there is not much of it in German-speaking countries. Because is becoming more and more fashionable, however, preliminary warning is necessary: literary semiotics is reminiscent in form of literary history, literary theory, or even literary and as result there is tendency to put in place of science or one of its sub-disciplines. But this must be resisted. Even Morris, for whom was to bring about a thoroughgoing unification of scientific knowledge as proposed in program of International Encyclopedia of Unified Science limited its role to that of providing the way in which scientific method can be applied to domains of literature, art, morality, and religion (1971: 314).1

Soviet Semiotics and Literary Criticism

VOLUTION, wrote Tynyanov, does not go by plan but by leaps and bounds; it is not a development, but a dislocation. For nearly a generation from the end of the 1920s there was no speculative or theoretical thinking about literature in the Soviet Union. The great debates of the twenties were stilled. The formalist theoreticians turned to textual scholarship (Eikhenbaum, Tomashevsky, Vinogradov), to the cinema and journalism (Shklovsky, Osip Brik), or to the novel (Tynyanov). Socialist realism had won the day, and its doctrine lay like a heavy stratum over the once rich and varied seams of independent speculative thought. The decade up to the war did, however, produce some isolated works of originality and brilliance (from the scholars who worked with the linguist N. Ya. Marr), and the great tradition of stylistics continued, putting into the practice of Pushkin scholarship the theoretical insights of the previous decade. Bakhtin, too, worked on, though his major works of this period were not to see the light until many years later. Evolution, said Tynyanov, is an interrupted line. The evolution he had in mind, the sudden flowering of Russian literature in the nineteenth century, was an organic process that owed little to outside pressures. The evolution of Russian literary theory in the twentieth century, however, has suffered its jolts, interruptions, and dislocations at the hands of a Stalin, a Zhdanov, or a Suslov; it is a process deliberately thwarted and, for a time at least, wholly suppressed. The reemergence of literary theory in the early sixties came about in a quite unexpected and uniquely Soviet way. If certain areas are sensitive to investigation, or even taboo, the energy of speculative thought will be deflected into areas which are neutral, perhaps scientific, or even technologically useful. It was by such a deflection into science and technology that a whole new and original school of literary semiotics came into being in the Soviet Union. In the vacuum left in Soviet intellectual life after the death of Stalin

Four Recent Books on Literary Semiotics

Four Recent Books on Literary Semiotics

Bibliographies and Surveys of Literary Semiotics (Contd.)

Bibliographies and Surveys of Literary Semiotics (Contd.)

Literary Semiotics: A Linguistic Reading of Text

Literary Semiotics: A Linguistic Reading of Text