‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
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John A. F Hopkins
His research interest is the semiotics of literature. His publications include ‘For theory: Modernism, intentionality and context’ (1998); ‘Literary signification as a complex sign process: Text, intertext, and context’ (1999); ‘Voix de l'auteur/voix du lecteur: Analyse sémiotique d'un poème de Yoshioka Minoru’ (2001); ‘La théorie littéraire sémiotique de Michael Riffaterre: Matrice, intertexte, et interprétant’ (2005).
Abstract
This overview of Michael Riffaterre's work in poetics aims to trace the development of the key concepts of Semiotics of Poetry, from his initial ‘stylistics’ phase, moving through the subsequent New Criticism and Piagetian structuralist phases. There is an account of the debate with Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss over a valid method for interpreting a Baudelaire sonnet, in the course of which several elements of the mature theory are developed. These are treated in detail in the following section on Semiotics of Poetry, and demonstrated in the analysis of a Gautier poem. The concept of the ‘matrix’ is seen to require modification, as it is sugggested that a single matrix cannot account for the complexity of the underlying propositional structure of the text. After touching on Riffaterre's work on narrative, the author's work on the perception-changing effect of the modernist text is briefly discussed.
About the author
His research interest is the semiotics of literature. His publications include ‘For theory: Modernism, intentionality and context’ (1998); ‘Literary signification as a complex sign process: Text, intertext, and context’ (1999); ‘Voix de l'auteur/voix du lecteur: Analyse sémiotique d'un poème de Yoshioka Minoru’ (2001); ‘La théorie littéraire sémiotique de Michael Riffaterre: Matrice, intertexte, et interprétant’ (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics
- ‘Reloading’ movies into commercial reality: A multimodal analysis of The Matrix trilogy's promotional posters
- The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!
- The narrative semiotics of The Daily Show
- Le produit in situ : Analyse (sémiotique) d'une photographie d'Andreas Gursky 99 cent
- Semiotic systemity of visual artworks: Case study of The Holy Trinity by Rublev
- ‘What's in a picture?’ A comparison of drawings by apes and children
- ‘Aller sans mais se sentir avec’ : emplois absolus non-innocents de avec et sans
- An interview with Paul Newman
- ‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
- Application d'une hypothèse de linguistique textuelle : Le génotexte
- Information, semiotics, and symbolic systems
- Assuming positions: Organizational change as mediated through metaphors
- Icon, index, symbol and denotation, connotation, metasign
- Toxic substances, semiotic forms: Towards a socio- and textual analysis of altered senses
- Playing doubles: Derrida's writing
- Paratextology
- Semiotics of space: Peirce and Lefebvre
- Gesture and language
