Volume 2007, Issue 165

This collection of articles is, as the title of this special issue of Semiotica reveals, about the semiotics of literature. However, not every branch of literary semiotics is equally well represented in this issue. The reason is that it has been my intention to present a few approaches to literary semiotics, primarily that of Peircean semiotics and those of continental phenomenology and cognitive studies. Hence the structuralist tradition within literary semiotics is less well represented. It is certainly not absent, it has inspired and/or is discussed in several articles (e.g. Bundgaard, Bundgaard and Ostergaard, Davidsen, Grünbaum, Herman, Hogan, Ryan, and Stjernfelt and Zeuthen). So, even if it has been my ambition here to present different approaches, I would like to state that I find it old-fashioned and harmful to perpetuate sometimes confrontations between different semiotic ‘schools.’ And especially, with regard to the semiotics of literature, it would be foolish not to recognize the value and importance of the structuralist approach. After all, a linguistically based semiotics is well tuned to deal with important aspects of literature; and research by, for instance, Barthes, Genette, Greimas, Kristeva, Todorov, and onwards from the French tradition has contributed very substantially to the scholarly study of literature. It is further interesting that the present cognitive study of literature has affinities with both the structuralist and the Peircean tradition within semiotics.

The use of diagrams as a tool of narrative analysis is a fundamentally semiotic project whose origins can be traced back to the emphasis placed by the structuralist movement on the synchronic systems that underlie signification. Defining diagrams as a spatial presentation of information which conveys meanings that could not be expressed in the linear form of a text, a list, or a formal coding system, this paper focuses on attempts to represent individual narrative plots, as opposed to diagrams that model a universal narrative structure or discourse phenomena. Through the analysis of diagrams relating to three aspects of plot — time, space, and mind — this paper argues that graphic representations are not merely a tool for representing narratological knowledge, but an important way to produce this knowledge. At their very best, they can be the seed of a new theory.

This article argues that for the past ten or fifteen years literary semiotics has been in a new phase of development. The adoption of Charles Peirce's pragmatic semiotics as the frame theory for research on literary semiosis has opened up new questions and topics for analysis and facilitated a return to essential concerns neglected by the earlier approaches. Three lines of interrogation emerge as central from work done to date: analysis of language-world relationship, imaginative reading, and interpretation as dialogic production of shared knowledge. The article reviews the main discussions on these topics, also relating the pragmatic approach to competing paradigms in literary studies.

It is well-known that Peirce developed a broad classification of the sciences, which are interconnected by hierarchically interdependent and non-linear relations. The higher the level of a science in the hierarchy, the more abstract that science is and, as such, it provides the less abstract sciences with general concepts and principles. At the same time, the empirical sciences provide the abstract ones with new problems and questions. At the core of Peirce's classification is his architecture of philosophical disciplines. It was his endeavor that these disciplines should display the general concepts and principles for all the idioscopic or special sciences. Considering that literary studies can be understood as an idioscopic science, the aim of this paper is to discuss the place of literature in Peirce's classificatory diagram and to suggest the possible relations that literary studies may entertain with the philosophical disciplines, that is, phenomenology, the normative sciences, and metaphysics.

As a consequence of the specific nature of Peirce's philosophical view, the literary text need not be set against semiotic theory; instead, it may be situated in such a way as to prolong the sign and the movement of semiosis. In the first instance, the author investigates the manifestation of the literary object within Peirce's semiotic discourse. Several references to Emerson's famous poem ‘The Sphinx’ are analyzed. This is followed by an analysis of three recurring literary figures: Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, and Chevalier Dupin. It becomes obvious that Peirce had a significant knowledge of these figures but, more importantly, this leads to recognizing the affinity that exists between such literary projects and Peirce's semeiotic: the latter seemingly feeding off the fictional nature of such literary works in constituting itself as a full-fledged semiotic discourse. In the second part of the article, the author examines two theoretical themes such as they develop within two classical literary works: aspects of Firstness (feelings and potentiality) with regards to the famous ‘Madeleine’ episode in Proust (Du côté de chez Swann) ; and an excess of iconicity such that it inhibits any movement of semiosis in Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’

Why, in light of the multiple approaches to literature that mark the various semiotic traditions and their complex intertwinings, would one turn to Susanne Langer's seemingly ‘marginal’ or idiosyncratic semiotic theory of art for conceptual resources? I argue that the conceptual core of the answer is found in Langer's notion of a ‘symbol of feeling,’ which is connected with her notion of ‘semblance,’ the imaginal power of art symbols to construct and present their own ‘primary illusions.’ Works of literature — of the poetic art — do not follow a discursive, but rather a presentational logic, giving us access to ‘virtual experience.’

In this article, an anthropological definition of literature is attempted. Since all communities seem to have some kind of literature (including its simple forms: myth, folktale, fable, proverb, and song), literature is claimed to be a human universal. Hence, literary discourse should be added to the four basic discourses that Habermas has pointed out and discussed; namely, theoretical, practical, historical, and technical discourses. Five characteristics of literary discourse are pointed out here: fictionality, poeticity, inquisitoriality, poetic licence, and contemplation. It is not claimed that every text that is classified as literary necessarily contains all five features, but a vast majority of them do. Finally, it is argued that literary discourse is special because it redefines Habermas' four so-called ‘universal-pragmatic validity’ claims: understandability, truth, normative rightness, and sincerity. These claims are not altogether suspended, but they are given new meanings and attenuated in literary discourse.

The ‘state of literature’ in a visual culture is analyzed against the background of a theoretical semiotic framework based upon the distinction between three types of signs: one-place images , two-place symbols , and three-place structures . It is argued that literature is linguistic mimetic meta-representation . The semiotic perspective allows us to deal, in a productive way, with a number of key issues in literary theory (such as ‘literariness,’ literature versus entertainment, and literary diachrony). Moreover, a methodology for the study of literature and the arts in culture is proposed, consisting of three complementary approaches or ‘strategies’: the phenomenological , the hermeneutical , and the empirical .

This article is an attempt to clarify the idea that narratives cohere by representing stories. Stories are causally related in the way proposed by Noël Carroll, i.e., the events and states constitute necessary conditions or sufficient conditions or INUS-conditions of each other. Then, a general concept of propositional coherence is suggested. It is based on Nelson Goodman's and Joseph Ullian's ideas about unitary formulas. Narrative coherence is defined as the propositional understanding of a text (in the wide sense, including non-verbal narratives) that constitutes one unitary string built upon conditional relations, i.e., relations between individuals matching Carroll's types of conditions.

Narratives in literature and even in the comics have become self-referential. A self-referential narrative sign is one that represents itself. The sign is its own object, narrating and narrated time become conflated. Instead of narrating a story, a self-referential narrative narrates that it narrates and how or why the characters in the narrative have found their way into the narrative. M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine is a self-referential comic book story of a protagonist who learns from his narrators, a team of comic book artists, that he exists only on the paper of a comic book. Two semiotic devices of self-referential verbal and pictorial narrating are distinguished and examined. Iconic self-reference is exemplified by self-repeating signs and signs that represent themselves in the form of mirror texts or self-referential pictures in the picture (mise en abyme). Indexical self-reference is exemplified by the devices of fragmentation and metalepsis, the participation of a narrator in the narrative events. Metalepsis leads to narrative paradoxes and is a major source of humor.

In early narratological research, roles were construed as invariant semantic functions fulfilled by characters with variable surface features (e.g., both Claudius in Hamlet and Lex Luther in Superman instantiate the role of ‘villain’). Subsequent story analysts have drawn on a range of explanatory paradigms — including models of discourse processing, semantic and functionalist frameworks, and (socio)pragmatic theories — to develop richer accounts of roles and their bearing on narrative understanding. The present paper provides an overview of this research, arguing for the advantages of an integrative approach in which roles assume the profile of complex, multidimensional, inferential constructs. From this perspective, roles in narrative are constellations of structural, semantic, and other factors, any subset of which may be more or less salient, depending on the nature and distribution of the discourse cues used to trigger role-based inferences in narrative contexts. The multifacetedness of roles in stories and the resulting need to combine multiple role-theoretic perspectives are pertinent for emergent research initiatives concerned with ‘narrative intelligence’ (Davis 2005; Mateas and Senger 2003), among other approaches to narrative viewed as a cognitive and sociosemiotic resource.

The key to fictionality is the construction of fictional minds. A fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of the mental functioning of the characters who inhabit the storyworld created by that narrative. Readers enter a storyworld primarily by using their knowledge of how to interpret other people's thought processes in the real world in order to try to follow the workings of characters' minds. Otherwise, readers will lose the plot. In this essay, I will suggest that there are twelve features relating to fictional minds that recur in all or nearly all novels. This argument will be put into three contexts: the cognitive turn in literature studies, discussions regarding the concept of narrative universals, and the longstanding debate on how the term narrative should be properly defined. I will also argue that my generalizations regarding the twelve features are not invalidated by a few counterexamples, and that some, particularly postmodern, novels gain their power and impact precisely from their attempts to undermine the default assumptions contained in these features.

The concept of the unreliable narrator is among the most discussed in current narratology. From being considered a text-internal matter between the personified narrator and the implied author by Booth, or the implied reader by Chatman, cognitive and constructivist narrative theorists like A. Nünning have described it as a reader-dependent issue. The detection of a narrator's unreliability is an act of ‘naturalization,’ he claims, with reference to Culler. This article concentrates on this long and ongoing debate and considers the different approaches critically with special attention to the position of A. Nünning. In the final section, a four-category taxonomy for the different textual strategies that establishes unreliable narration is suggested. The headlines for the taxonomy are intranarrational unreliability, internarrational unreliability, intertextual unreliability, and extratextual unreliability.

This paper aims to establish the origin of the narrative schema in the perception of intentional movements. The distinction between mechanical and intentional movements is vital for human beings, and the narrative schema, which is underpinned by this distinction, is therefore a basic cognitive principle of intelligibility. This is the reason why the narrative schema is by no means confined to the domain of the literary work of art. It is rather a major principle for the combination of partial significations in many other domains. The paper explores the role traditionally assigned to the narrative schema within continental semiotics and, through an interpretation of Heider and Simmel's study on apparent behavior, it establishes the cognitive import of the narrative schema and its origin in visual perception; finally, it gives examples of the meaning organizing import of the narrative schema.

This text has two parts. In the first section, we intend to define the narrative schema — the canonical plot structure — as a symbolic form in Ernst Cassirer's sense of the term. This basically implies that the narrative schema is not an invariant higher order combinatorial form, but may itself be subject to variations in view of yielding specific meaning effects. This is because the production and reception of a narrative is a dynamic process where physical forces, modal forces and intentions set up a space of possibilities for the narrative trajectory. We therefore propose a determination of the narrative schema in terms of ‘force dynamics.’ In the next section we proceed to an analysis of Ernst Hemingway's ‘A Very Short Story’ in order to illustrate this point. We lay down the main elements of its remarkable, if not simply outstanding both narrative and semantic-configurational structure: its plot structure is indeed driven by an inverted narrative schema and each significant event in the story but one (as well as each physical paragraph but one) has its rigorously symmetrical counterpart. Moreover, this inverted schema can be explained in terms of the modal forces at stake in the narrative.

In spite of the current panoply of approaches to literary semantics, this paper argues that the discipline suffers from one scandalous absence: the theorization of Vorstellung , or ‘perceptual modification.’ The paper traces the trajectory of the elimination of Vorstellung in language semantics from Frege to Saussure and to the demise of the signified in the post-Saussurean tradition. Alternative perspectives are introduced that promise the rehabilitation of the perceptual ingredients of language, such as cognitive linguistics (Lakoff) and corporeal pragmatics (Ruthrof), approaches that could be used to revive literary semantics by granting Vorstellung its proper role in the theorization of literary meaning.

In this article, I argue that the representation of simple, bodily action has the function of endowing the narrative sequence with a visualizing power. It makes the narrated scenes or situations ready for visualization by the reader or listener. By virtue of this visualizing power or disposition, these narrated actions disrupt the theoretical divisions, on the one hand, between the narrated story and the narrating discourse, and on the other hand, between plot-narratology and discourse-narratology. As narrated actions, they seem to belong to the domain of plot-narratology, but insofar as they serve an important visualizing function, these narrated actions have a communicative function and, as such, they can be said to belong to the domain of discourse-narratology. In the first part of the article, I argue that a certain type of plot-narratology, due to its retrospective epistemology and abstract definition of action, is unable to conceive of this visualizing function. In the second part, I argue that discourse-narratology fares no better since the visualizing function is independent of voice and focalization. In the final part, I sketch a possible account of the visualizing function of simple actions in narratives.

A new term has appeared within semiotics over the last few decades: ‘phenomenological semiotics.’ However, it can appear to be unclear how to understand this new compound term. Phenomenology is a multifarious philosophical movement that no longer allows itself to be used as a descriptive adjective. In this article, I will attempt to qualify the term. My starting point is that both Edmund Husserl, and the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden are relevant for a preparation of a cognitive semiotics that does not eliminate the formation of the sign's phenomenological dimension. To illustrate this, I will stress the semiotic perspective within cognitive linguistics with basis in the triadic concept of the sign within the phenomenological tradition, and remain critical of, among others, Ronald Langacker and John R. Taylor's support for Ferdinand de Saussure's dyadic concept of the sign. To conclude, I will sketch a phenomenological theory of sign's effect on a literary semiotics with Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway as an example.

This article explores some junctions between literary semiotics and cognitive semantics with special focus on the cultural aspect of meaning and contextualized meaning construction. A cognitive model is introduced to account for cultural meaning and is related to the Greimasian concepts of figuration and configuration. A blending model is presented in regard to a more general discussion of contextualized meaning, and its literary usefulness is demonstrated in an analysis of a Proustian analogy.

This paper investigates the classical issue of ‘point of view,’ but from a cognitive stance. Under the headline of ‘enunciation,’ the paper argues that the cognitive linguistics tradition may provide a better understanding of the subjective aspect of language in general and of the narrative aspect of fiction in particular. The paper introduces the contributions of Leonard Talmy and Wallace Chafe. Talmy frames the issues of enunciation within his notion of conceptual structures, while Chafe reinterprets point-of-view as the issue of devices permitting different representations of consciousness in a text. The paper further develops these insights with reference to analyses of a string of fiction examples.

Mirth is a central feature of our experience of literature and related arts. This essay considers the nature and origins of mirth. It begins with a suggestion by Greimas regarding the structure of jokes. Greimas's view dovetails nicely with empirical research on the neurobiology that underlies our appreciation of humor, in particular the generation of meaning in the right hemisphere of the brain. The essay turns from this research to a componential analysis of emotion, considering what elements must enter into a cognitive account of an emotion. Ideally, such an account will include systemic/functional, neurobiological, and evolutionary components. Moreover, it is crucial to distinguish between the mechanisms produced by evolution and the reproductive functions that those mechanisms approximate. Having treated some of the neurobiological material, the essay takes up the systemic/functional aspect of mirth. Specifically, it argues that mirth is produced by particular practices (including right hemisphere meaning generation) that are characteristic of children when they are striving to accomplish tasks beyond their developmental level. Even in cases where mirth is distinctly ‘adult’ (e.g., in obscenity), the mechanism at issue is characteristic of children. The final section argues that this mechanism is comprehensible in evolutionary terms as it fosters bonding and an appropriate degree of attention to children.