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Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka

Published/Copyright: June 3, 2008
Semiotica
From the journal Volume 2008 Issue 170

Abstract

This article aims at showing that African drama relies on semiotic foundations to create a meaning that could have been censored. Examples from five of Wole Soyinka's plays will constitute a springboard towards tackling the semiotic issues relating to ‘language,’ ‘referentiality,’ and ‘kinesic signification.’ The semiotic reading of these works reveals that African drama, embodied in one of its most prolific playwrights, has used semiotics to enrich the dramatic language of theatre and the experience of audiences that counted mainly on the spoken word to create meaning.

Published Online: 2008-06-03
Published in Print: 2008-June

© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Foreword
  2. Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
  3. Conceptual knowledge as emergence
  4. Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
  5. Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
  6. ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
  7. On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
  8. Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
  9. Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
  10. Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
  11. Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
  12. I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
  13. Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
  14. The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
  15. The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
  16. Présentation
  17. Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
  18. Barthes ou Eco
  19. Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
  20. La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
  21. Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
  22. Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
https://doi.org/10.1515/SEM.2008.063

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Foreword
  2. Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
  3. Conceptual knowledge as emergence
  4. Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
  5. Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
  6. ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
  7. On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
  8. Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
  9. Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
  10. Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
  11. Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
  12. I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
  13. Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
  14. The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
  15. The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
  16. Présentation
  17. Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
  18. Barthes ou Eco
  19. Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
  20. La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
  21. Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
  22. Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
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