Semiotics

Second Edition 2005

Semiotics can be defined broadly as a domain of investigation that explores the nature and function of
signs as well as the systems and processes underlying signification, expression, representation, and
communication. As can be demonstrated from numerous cultural traces (verbal, pictorial, plastic, spatial
artifacts, etc.), the constitution of signs, the laws that govern them, and their role in human life have been
ongoing concerns over the ages. As noted by John Deely (Frontiers in Semiotics, 1986 ; Four Ages of
Understanding, 2001) and Thomas Sebeok (Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, 1976 ; The Sign and Its
Masters, 1979), the history of investigation into the nature of signs is an important aspect of the history of
philosophy in general, and contributions to the theory can be traced back to the Greeksfrom Heraclitus to
the Stoics, from PLATO to ARISTOTLE to the Hellenistic and Roman periods; the early Christian thinkers and
church fathers (e.g. , ST. AUGUSTINE ); medieval authors; humanists such as DANTE ALIGHIERI and philosophers
such as FRANCIS BACON; seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century philosophers,
grammarians, and scientists such as John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, George Berkeley, tienne
Bonnot de Condillac, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Jean Franois Champollion, and Edmund
Husserl, to name but a few of the many important contributors to the doctrine of signs. The twentieth
century witnessed a revival of interest in the principles of sign systems and processes inherited from this
long tradition of intellectual activity, mainly because of the pioneering work of FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE and
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE , who are recognized as the founders of the modern European and Anglo-American
traditions of semiotics. Overviews of some of the main contributors to the history of semiotics are provided
by Tzvetan Todorov (Thories du symbole, 1977 , Theories of the Symbol, 1982), Thomas Sebeok
(Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 1986), John Deely (Introducing Semiotic, 1982) and Paul Bouissac
(Encyclopedia of Semiotics, 1998).
Literary semiotics can be seen as a branch of the general science of signs that studies a particular
group of texts within verbal texts in general. Although the task of literary semiotics is to describe what is
characteristic of literary texts or discourse, it is founded on the same principles and analytic procedures as
the semiotics of verbal discourse. However, for two fundamental reasons, there exists no generally accepted
definition of the scope and object of literary semiotics. First, the boundaries of literary discourse seem to
have been established more by tradition than by objective, formal criteria. Contrary to other semiotic
discourses, for example, legal discourse, literary discourse cannot be characterized by a specifically
distinctive content. For instance, the literariness of a text (in the framework of the intrinsic structure of the
text) varies according to culture and epoch; as Jurij Lotman and others have shown, a text identified as
being religious in the Middle Ages is seen as literary today. Second, there is a wide-ranging, continuing
debate regarding the status of the verbal sign and the nature of the signifying process, as underscored in the
entry "Sign " in both Thomas Sebeoks Encyclopedic Dictionary (93647) and Paul Bouissacs
Encyclopedia (57275). The fundamental differences between opposing semioticians are related mainly to
whether they adopt an intentional, or meaning-oriented, description of a sign system or the codes
correlating a given expression with a given content or a more extensional, truth-condition-oriented one that
concentrates on the processes of communication by which signs are used to designate, to refer to "things or
states of the real or of some possible world " (Sebeok, Encyclopedic 937).
To review even the major contributions to literary semiotics in the twentieth century is beyond the
scope of this survey. However, Charles Morris, who drew his inspiration from Peirce, can provide us with a
conceptual framework that makes it possible to situate various approaches that have furthered the
development of the semiotics of literature in relationship to one another. Starting with the definition of
"semiosis " as a process in which signs function as vehicles, interpretants, and interpreters, Morris
determines three areas of complementary investigation: syntactics, which studies the relation of signvehicles within sign systems; semantics, the relation of signs to objects they represent; and pragmatics, the
relation of signs to interpreters. Hence, if one considers literary texts in terms of semiosis, they can be
defined as syncretic sign systems encompassing a syntactic dimension that can be analyzed on the
phonological level (e.g. , the specific sound patterns organizing the text) and on the level of narrative
syntax; the semantic level (the content elements of the text); and the pragmatic or communicative context
(addresser and addressee). In short, the first two dimensions stress the structural features of texts and are
concerned with their expression and content forms, whereas the third dimension stresses the signifying
process and concentrates on analyzing texts generative processes and interrelations with other texts
(Sebeok, Encyclopedic 45354). Far from being exclusive, the different methodological approaches to each
of these domains of investigation mapped out by Morris are complementary.
Contrary to Peirce, who adopted a philosophical and logical perspective to the study of signs and

proposed a general theory of semiotics in which linguistic signs had an important but by no means essential
role, Saussure worked out the foundations of a general linguistic theory in which he considered language as
a system of signs. Linguistics was considered to be part of the general science of semiology, which he
defined as "a science that studies the life of signs within society. . . . It would be part of social psychology
and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeon sign).
Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them " (trans. Baskin, 16).
Although Saussure himself did not make major contributions to the semiotics of literature before his
death in 1916, his writings were instrumental in the development of literary semiotics in Europe, especially
with respect to the study of the syntactic and semantic dimensions of texts. Jurii Tynianov and ROMAN
JAKOBSON openly acknowledge the impact Saussurean linguistics had on the theoretical work undertaken by
the Russian Formalists during the first three decades of the century: the heuristic value of the
synchronic/diachronic opposition, of the notion of system, of the distinction between speech and language:
For linguistics as well as for literary history, the clear opposition between the synchronic
(static) aspect and the diachronic aspect was a rich working hypothesis because it
demonstrated the systematic character of language (or literature) at each particular period of
life. . . . The establishment of two different notions parole and langue and the analysis of
their relation (the Geneva School) were extremely fruitful for linguistics. To apply these two
categories (the existing norm and individual utterances) to literature and to study their relation,
is a problem that must be examined in detail. ( "Problems " 1012)
In his major review of the Formalists goals and accomplishments, Boris Eikhenbaum stressed the
importance of theory in uncovering the systematic nature of literary facts and, in the words of Roman
Jakobson in "On Realism in Art, " of focusing not on literature but on "literariness, " that is to say, on the
pertinent features of literary texts that distinguish them from other discourse. Contemporary linguistic
theory was used by the Formalists to compare spoken language with literary language and to consolidate
the principle of specification. Victor Shklovskii (Theory of Prose, 1929) made great progress in analyzing
the short story and the novel when he linked processes inherent to composition with general stylistic
processes and related the variable and permanent aspects of the artistic form of a work with those of other
works, thereby setting out the possibilities for a history of forms, one that still remains to be written. Other
fundamental concepts, such as motivation, basically concerned with plot construction (circular construction;
composition by steps, or the breaking down of action into episodes, frame, and the rhetorical procedures
that are built into this; parallelism; enumeration; oxymoron), led to the distinction between elements in the
construction of a work (subject) and those that make up its material (fable) and laid the groundwork for
Vladimir Propps discovery of function in the plot analysis of folktales, one of the most important
innovations of the Russian Formalists. Later Soviet semioticians, such as MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, who wrote major
works on Franois Rabelais, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the dialogical principles governing communication,
were influential in extending the boundaries of literary semiotics and reorienting the domain from a more
scientistic bent to a semiotics of culture (Todorov).
Whether imported directly from America and Geneva or indirectly via Russia or Vienna, both Peirces
"semiotic " and Saussures "semiology " were influential in the studies of the verbal arts undertaken by the
members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, as demonstrated by Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik in the
preface to their anthology, Semiotics of Art. In his programmatic article "Art as Semiotic Fact " (1934)Jan
Mukaovsk established the semiotic framework for the study of art and suggested that the work of art
should be considered as a sign composed of "(1) a perceivable signifier, created by the artist, (2) a
signification /= aesthetic object/ registered in the collective consciousness and (3) a relationship with that
which is signified, a relationship which refers to the total context of social phenomena " (Matejka and
Titunik 6). Other critics, such as Petr Bogatyrev and Jiri Veltrusky (in Matejka and Titunik), made
important advances in the study of visual semiotics as applied to folk art, songs, and theater. Theater as a
medium is considered by these critics as transforming its constituent elements into a semiotic structure
(visual signs, e.g. , decor, costume, body, etc. , and acoustic signs, e.g. , voice, dialogue, music, etc.), and
an attempt is made to lay bare the rules underlying these systems. In other essays in Semiotics of Art,
Roman Jakobson ( "What Is Poetry? ") and Jan Mukaovsk ( "Poetic Reference ") further the study of
poetic language by investigating the problem of poetic reference from the point of view of internal
reference and its oblique but essential relationship to the extralinguistic context. Jakobson concludes that art
is an integral part of social structure and that although the "concept of the content of poetry is unstable and
temporally conditioned . . . the poetic function, poeticity is an element sui generis, one that cannot be
mechanically reduced to other elements " (174). (See PRAGUE SCHOOL STRUCTURALISM.)
French semiotics, which developed directly from RUSSIAN FORMALISM and Prague structuralism and
arrived in Paris via New York thanks to Roman Jakobsons influence on CLAUDE LVI - STRAUSS during World
War II, made a critical contribution to the study of literary texts during the mid-1960s. A special issue of
Communications edited by ROLAND BARTHES in 1966 and devoted to the structural analysis of narrative
contains articles by the leading European semioticians who had a profound impact on the future and
evolution of literary semiotics. In his introduction, which owes a great deal to Louis Hjelmslevs rethinking

and development of Saussures concepts of sign, system, and process, to Claude Lvi-Strauss for the study
of the paradigmatic notion of structure, and to mile Benveniste (Problmes de linguistique gnrale, 2
vols. , 196674, vol. 1 translated as Problems in General Linguistics, 1971)for the concept of level of
analysis, Barthes ascertains that narrative analysis must be based on deductive procedures and must
construct hypothetical models patterned on structural linguistics. He proposes a multilevel model of analysis
in which each level is in a hierarchical relationship to the others and narrative elements have both
distributional (if relations are situated at the same level) and integrative relationships (if situated at different
levels). In turn, levels are defined as operations or systems of symbols and rules. Barthes then delimits three
linked levels of description "functions, " "actions, " and "narration " in which a function has meaning
only within the field of action of an actant, and action is meaningful only when narrated.
The other authors in this volume propose alternate and complementary solutions to some of the
problems raised by Barthes. Claude Bremonds contribution, on the logic of narrative possibilities, is
situated at the most abstract level and examines the logical constraints (sequences of functions) of the
organized events of any narrative. Algirdas Julien Greimass text focuses on the more anthropomorphic
level of representation, actions, where primary logical functions take on meaning. These actants, or agents,
are described in terms not of what they are but of what they do and by their participation in a limited
number of classifiable spheres of action, inasmuch as they partake of three major semantic axes:
communication, desire (quest), and test. Moreover, agents are arranged in pairs, and the large number of
characters in a narrative is reduced to a structure (Subject/Object, Addresser/Addressee, Helper/Opponent)
that is projected along the entire narrative. As an object of communication, narrative is dependent upon an
Addresser (narrator) and an Addressee (narratee), and formal marks of both narrator and narratee are
considered as being immanent to the text (see Denis Bertrand in Perron and Collins; Greimassian
Semiotics; and Budniakiewicz for a more up-to-date elaboration of Greimass theory of narrativity). UMBERTO
ECO s article, which analyzes Ian Flemings James Bond novels, deals with narrative combinatories, whereas
Tzvetan Todorov, in his study of the categories of literary texts, proposes a more global and more
integrated theory of narrative that not only takes into account functions and actions but also concentrates
heavily on the level of narration. The volume closes with an important article by GRARD GENETTE on the
boundaries of narrative that establishes distinctions between diegesis and mimesis, narration and
description, and narrative and discourse and lays the groundwork for his influential work on the structure of
time (i.e. , the relation between the form of expression and the form of content of time) in Prousts la
recherche du temps perdu.
It is possible to trace two major tendencies in France that evolve from the intellectual activity of the
mid-1960s. The first, founded on the Saussurean-Hjelmslevian legacy, best represented by work done by
Greimas, has become known as the "Paris school " of semiotics. This school, which concentrates more on
syntactic and semantic domains of the discipline, adopts an immanentist attitude to texts, as pointed out by
Herman Parret in his introduction to Paris School Semiotics (Perron and Collins). Greimass own
monumental Maupassant, in which he examines a short story from the perspective of his theoretical
transpositional model of signification, whereby complex procedures of textual production are identified and
thematic readings are linked up with semantic analysis, is the most exemplary of these studies. (See also
Greimas, On Meaning, as well as Schleifer and Broden, for an overview of Greimass semiotic theory.) In
two of his recent books, De limperfection (1987)and Smiotique des passions (1991, The Semiotics of
Passions, 1993), the latter coauthored with Jacques Fontanille, Greimas, having in his prior works set in
place a modal syntax, explores the possibility of constructing a discursive syntax based on aspectualities
(states of a temporal processinchoateness, duration, terminationthat allow for the representation of
temporality as process). This final stage, which builds on the actional and cognitive dimensions of analysis
worked out from the 1960s to the 1980s, attempts to give a semiotic interpretation to traditional theories of
passions. Greimas and Fontanille seek to establish a coherent methodology that articulates the relationship
between semiotic theory and philosophy, and they also endeavor to rethink semiotic theory in general,
founded on the actional and the cognitive, by introducing the concept of passion. The study of the passional
dimension of numerous literary texts is accompanied by a disengagement with Peirces semiotic and an
engagement with PHENOMENOLOGY and catastrophe theory, notably as represented by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(proprioception) and Ren Thom (perception, saliency/ pregnanz ), whereas Franois Rastier investigates
methods useful to the analysis of language and literature and seeks to better understand signs, all the while
emphasizing their relation to action and culture.
The second tendency is represented by the large number of works that draw their inspiration from a
radical questioning of the structural principles defining semiosis. JULIA KRISTEVA and especially Barthes were
instrumental in this respect. Indeed, the latter begins his study S/Z by challenging the very possibility of
structural analysis to account for the specificity or individuality of any text. He then shifts the problematic
from that of science and ideology to that of writing and rewriting, in short to a semiotics of addressers and
addressees, of signs and interpreters. In so doing he also substitutes a semiotics of codes for a semiotics of
signs and processes and, without structuring or hierarchizing them, determines five codes under which all
the textual signifiers can be grouped: hermeneutic (enigma), semic, symbolic, proairetic (actions), and
cultural (references to a science or body of knowledge).

In his innovative work, Umberto Eco attempts to overcome some of the dramatic oppositions that exist
between the Saussurean (Hjelmslevian-Greimassian) and Peircean theories of semiosis, which originate
from very different epistemological contexts and traditions (see Perrons introduction in Greimassian
Semiotics ). In The Role of the Reader (1979)Eco integrates the three domains of semiotics identified by
Morris and works out an elaborate theory of the reader as an active principle of interpretation in the
generative process of text. He begins with the hypothesis that an author must form a model of a possible
reader and must also assume that the set of codes relied upon is shared by the reader. He rewrites the
standard communication model (Addresser-Message-Addressee) to better take into account the semanticpragmatic processes at work within texts and examines the various codes and subcodes in which a message
is emitted and by which an author organizes and communicates a text to a reader. Eco introduces operative
notions such as model reader and closed and open texts, and he integrates concepts dealing with discursive
and narrative structures, topics, isotopies, textual levels, and intertextual competence into a general semiotic
theory of narrative. (For a detailed account of Ecos contribution to the study of literary texts, see Capozzi.)
Robert Scholes, whose work deals with particular texts and ways in which they may be read and
interpreted, does not concentrate on the syntactic or semantic dimension of narrative per se but adopts a
semiotic approach based on the study of codes. He shows how the literary work, far from being a closed
system "free of authorial intention, free of historical necessity, and free of the readers projection of value
and meaning " (15), as NEW CRITICISM would have us believe, is, on the contrary, an open text linked to
history, to cultural, semantic, and literary codes, and to other texts. Other critics, for example, Terence
Hawkes (Structuralism and Semiotics, 1977), Jonathan Culler (Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, 1975 , and The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature,
Deconstruction, 1981), TERRY EAGLETON(Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983), and FREDRIC JAMESON (The
Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, 1972), have
offered both a critique and discussion on the limits of the semiotic project. In an attempt to go beyond the
paradigm of structural semiotics, Jackson Barry in the innovative work Art, Culture, and the Semiotics of
Meaning examines how the perception of the artistic form, including verbal texts, can contribute to the
emergence of meaning. From Saussure to Hjelmslev, to Greimas, to Peirce, to recent developments in
cognitive sciences, Barry explores how the form of art, its signifier, literally helps "make " meaning.
Semiotic theory has been refined and modified progressively through the investigation of various
literary genres and specific domains. Paul Zumthor, Donald Maddox, and Eugene Vance, among others,
have been instrumental in reshaping a "new kind of linguistically informed medievalism that is as much
oriented toward studying the discursive consciousness of medieval intellectual life as it is toward the
documentation of events " (Vance, "Chaucers " 725). James Burke considers the authorship of Cantar de
Mio Cid, one of the great works of Spanish literature, by examining its key structural components and
shows that the text was produced in a manner typical for the Middle Ages by an author who followed
procedures very specific to the period, whereas Stephen Nimis has contributed to the study of narrative
semiotics in the epic tradition from Homer to Milton.
Michael Riffaterre has played a central role in advancing poetic theory by integrating a theory of
intertextuality with semiotic theory and by providing a flexible definition of the notion of intertext. He
begins by defining the semiotic process within the context of the reader and the act of reading and then
distinguishes two levels or stages of reading: "heuristic reading, " where meaning is apprehended and the
readers competence comes into play, followed by "retroactive reading, " whereby the reader performs a
structural decoding as a variant of the same structural matrix. Riffaterre defines and makes operational
notions such as matrix, the minimal and literal sentence transformed into a longer, complex, and nonliteral
periphrasis that results in the poem; model, the form of the variants actualized; descriptive systems,
networks of words associated with one another around a kernel work; clichs, set phrases actualizing the
semes of a matrix or of a descriptive system; and hypograms, formed out of a words semes and/or
presuppositions.
Numerous monographs and articles have been published on the semiotics of the theater and the novel.
Anne Ubersfeld, Thomas Pavel, Keir Elam, Mark Kobernick, Patrice Pavis, Fernando de Toro, Jean Alter,
Marvin Carlson, and Andr Helbo and his collaborators have written pioneering and seminal works on the
semiotics of drama. While recognizing that a semiotics of theater must consider all aspects of dramatic
discourse as parts of a signifying whole, Ubersfeld concentrates on the text itself and studies the
relationships between its two distinct but inseparable parts, "dialogue " and "didascalia " (stage and
production directions). Pavel proposes an original theory and methodology of plot analysis drawn from
literary STRUCTURALISM and generative grammar and applies his model to a group of English Renaissance
tragedies. De Toro (Theatre Semiotics and "Toward a Specification ") attempts to give a comprehensive and
systematic approach to theater discourse that links its various components. He examines the process of
communication-receptionin binaries such as enunciative situation and utterance, deixis and anaphora, the
functions of theater language and actors discoursein order to furnish us with a base on which to establish
the specificity of discourse at the linguistic level. Elams work, the first full-length study of theater
semiotics in English, provides both an exhaustive survey of all that has been done in the field beforehand
and a personal theory of theater semiotics, illustrated by analysis of texts from classical (Hamlet) to modern

drama (Endgame), whereas Kobernick undertakes a detailed study of the semiotics of drama and the style
of Eugene ONeill.
A second wave of critics, more interactive and contextual, examines theater from the point of view of
performance, the sociosemiotic dimension, theater structures, and audience improvisation. Patrice Pavis
goes beyond the first wave of theater semiology, which aspired to global coverage and "scientific " rigor,
and concentrates on various aspects of semiological theory and stage practicegesture, body language,
reception, the discourse of drama criticism, systems of notation of theatrical performancebefore
concluding with the semiological analysis of two avant-garde theatrical performances. In another study, de
Toro ( "Toward a Socio-Semiotics ") attempts to link the semiotic approach to theater to a possible
sociosemiotics; that is, he tries to connect two theoretical and epistemological levels of the theater
phenomenon, the formal and the contextual. He explores three major areas where semiotics and sociology
could come together: the tasks of the sociosemiotics of the theater, the dramatic/performance text, and the
process of reception in the theater. Alters work tackles the sociosemiotic dimension of theater from a
different point of view. He proposes to begin entirely anew by reexamining the basic notions about theater
and semiotics, elucidating their problematic concepts, and proposing a new theory that would not give in to
prevailing opinion.
Working within the Saussurean framework that postulated the need to define the function of signs
within a social context, Alter examines a number of plays and performances from various perspectives
reference and performance, a grammar of theater referentiality, transformational processes
(production/reception and playwrights, directors, actors and their works). In so doing he reviews most of
the current literature in the area in an attempt to give his theory an anthropological foundation. Carlson also
examines a representative number of plays from a sociosemiotic perspective by analyzing the way theatrical
signs are produced and the ways they are received and interpreted by an audience. First he studies how
audiences develop interpretive strategies from sources both within and outside the production system itself,
then he focuses on the semiotics of space and its relationship to interpretation of the theater event, and
finally he deals with the creative contribution of the audience. In brief, Carlsons work envisions the theater
not only as a signifying textual system but also as a much vaster phenomenon inscribed in a physical
surrounding and a society that maintains a permanent relationship with an audience. A final work by Helbo
and his collaborators analyzes the theatrical event and the numerous elements that make up a performance
text, actor, space, spectator, social circumstancesfrom a variety of directions and using different
methodologies, but mainly semiotic analysis. The seven sections of this work provide an overview of
current theory, as well as new tools for analyzing performances.
A great deal has been written on the semiotics of the novel, but much of it has concentrated on
synchronic semiotic structures, for example, Claude Bremond (Logique du rcit), who studies the logic of
possibilities; Seymour Chatman (Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, 1978);
Roland Le Huenen and Paul Perron, who examine in detail the semiotics of character in Honor de Balzacs
Eugnie Grandet; and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, who gives an overview of narrative structures. Paul
Perron, in Semiotics and the Modern Quebec Novel, distinguishes the multiple signs in the Quebec novel
Agaguk and establishes a narrative grammar, based on the actional, cognitive, and passional semiotic
theory, that can be applied to a text as complex as a novel. For this purpose he redefines the concept of
sign and introduces a semiotics of passions that conditions the personages actions. Little has been written
on the diachronic structuration and the dialectical process of production of narrative texts, and Wladimir
Krysinski seeks to fill this void. In his work, theory and practice confront and sustain one another in an
attempt to understand the novel as a historically motivated semiotic process. Not only does Krysinski
attempt to work out a general semiotic theory but his analysis also focuses on modern texts by writers from
Dostoevsky to Roa Bastos, including HENRY JAMES, Andr Gide, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, Claude
Simon, and Hubert Aquin. Thomas Broden, in his analysis of Yeux bleus cheveux noirs by Marguerite
Duras, examines body movements and the sense of touch, deriving from them other principles that inform
the syntagmatic organization of discourse. He more particularly studies how modulations of pace, time,
tempo, and tensivity articulate the unfolding of the narrative.
Theoretical work by Teresa de Lauretis and Kaja Silverman makes important contributions to the
semiotic analysis of texts, especially of film texts. De Lauretis problematizes the earlier structural models
that consider desire as a type of thematic investment and reexamines the relations of narratives to genres
and to epistemological frameworks. She shows how the productivity of the text engages the reader as
subject in, and for, its process and places the reader in certain positions of plot space. Narrative is
considered as obeying an Oedipal logic that constrains and defines each reader within the position of a
sexual difference conceived as follows: male-hero-human on the side of the subject and female-obstacleboundary-space on the other side. In Femmes imaginaires (1986, Lethal Love, 1987)Mieke Bal extends her
earlier study of a more "scientific " bent, one inspired by Genettes structuralist narratology, and works out
a feminist narratology that ascribes to the gender of the narrator the same theoretical status as narrative
point of view, for instance. The critique of poststructuralist semiotics is furthered by Silverman, who
maintains the centrality of psychoanalysis to semiotics and also emphasizes "sexual difference as an
organizing principle not only of the symbolic order and its contents (signification, discourse, subjectivity),
but of the semiotic account of those things " (viii). Both of these important studies extend the theoretical

boundaries of literary semiotics into a domain of sociosemiotics and contribute to the redefinition of an
important area of CULTURAL STUDIES focusing on current feminist theory and practice.
A number of studies attempt to focus and refocus semiotics on the literary work in general and its
apprehension through the reading process. Literary semiotics is exploring two major areas of investigation,
the first related to working out a semiotic theory of reading and the second examining the mediating
function of the literary sign between symbolic forms and the materiality of the world. Although these two
areas deal with what Charles Morris identified as the pragmatic dimension of semiosis, or the relation of
signs to their interpreters, both build on prior theoretical work carried out by numerous semioticians in
syntactics and semantics. Under the impetus of PAUL RICOEURs Temps et rcit (3 vols. , 198385, Time and
Narrative, 198488)and relying on a multidisciplinary approach, Bertrand Gervais focuses on the activity of
reading, or what he calls the "reading contract. " Gervais studies the structural features of the conceptual
network of actions, their reception from the theoretical perspective of semiotics, the logic of actions,
artificial intelligence, and the cognitive sciences. By isolating the discursive representation of action and
considering it as a nodal component both of the narrative and of reading, and hence by instituting a
cognitive level of reading, Gervais frees semiotic theory and analysis from the narrow confines of the
structuralist and poststructuralist paradigm, opening up a very promising area of further inquiry.
If a major school of semiotics represented by Greimas and his collaborators seems to be disengaging
its work from Peirce and embracing phenomenology and catastrophe theory, numerous other semioticians
are reexamining Peircean theory and demonstrating its heuristic value in the study of literary texts. Julio C.
M. Pintos semantico-semiotic approach to the reading of time is also an attempt to develop an approach
that goes beyond structuralism, which concentrated on how time was organized in a text. Pinto sets out to
study the readers behavior with respect to temporal relations and to explain reading strategies within
semantic and semiotic theory. He adapts Peirces categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness and
equates them with perception, apprehension, and interpretation of the reading process before applying the
model to the study of a play by Harold Pinter and a novel by Ldo Ivo.
Michael Cabot Haley, in his study of the semiosis of poetic metaphor, examines the trope in light of
Peirces definitions of the sign. He deals successively with metaphor as symbol, index, and icon; metaphor
as image, diagram, and metaicon; metaphor as firstness; Peircean hypoicons in poetry; the Peircean index in
poetic metaphor; the index of figural displacement; and metaphoric semantic growth. John Sheriff proposes,
first, a radical critique of semiotic studies stemming from Saussurean or structuralist theory that describe a
literary work only as a closed formal network (Morriss syntactics and semantics), thereby negating its
signification, that is, negating the relation of the text to its interpreters, to being and possibility. Second,
Sheriff reexamines Peirces triadic theory of signs and studies what he considers to be the three aspects of a
literary text: the text not actualized through the act of reading is seen as a virtual signifier, corresponding to
Peirces eighth category of legisigns (rheme); the act of reading actualizes meaning by giving an
interpretation related to the lived experience, and here the text corresponds to the ninth category of legisigns
(dicisign); and the text as sign of autorepresentation, the most abstract level, corresponds to the tenth
category (argument).
Most of the semioticians currently working in the Peircean paradigm to some degree or other adhere to
Sheriffs critique of the limits of Saussurean- or structuralist-inspired semiotic theory and support the need,
through the dynamics of semiosis, to open up the study of text onto the social environment. As Jean Fisette
notes, these works, which raise important epistemological questions about the concept of texts, their mode
of existence in a given culture, and also their contribution to the issue of symbolic productions in general,
could herald a "renewal of studies in literary semiotics which, this time, would be free of all the canons
inherited from structuralism " (184).

Paul Perron
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Bibliography
See also ROLAND BARTHES , DRAMA THEORY , UMBERTO ECO, FICTION THEORY AND CRITICISM , FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM , JULIA
KRISTEVA , NARRATOLOGY, CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE , PRAGUE SCHOOL STRUCTURALISM, RUSSIAN FORMALISM , FERDINAND DE
SAUSSURE , and STRUCTURALISM.
See bibliographies in MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, ROLAND BARTHES , UMBERTO ECO, FREDRIC JAMESON , JULIA KRISTEVA , PAUL RICOEUR, and
RUSSIAN FORMALISM for texts by and on those writers and topics.

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Biblical Love Stories, trans. Bal, 1987)

Mieke Bal, Narratology (1985)

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