Abstract
Illuminating innovatively the dialectic by which “sign” is induced “to signify” requires an analysis of the inferrer-entailed symbolics constituting “signified,” a process particularly observable during relative, purposeful re-signification, particularly at high-visibility sites. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne focused intently his romantic-dramatic oeuvre on cynosural women, because of his affinity for allegorical signification, and especially for his tangibility to feminist themes and axiologies of virtue transcending even the highly reformist nineteenth century, he is here chosen an interpretation-open “carrier wave” for that research. Climactically and consonant thematically, also instructive is Umberto Eco’s unnamed, eponymous “Rose” for being an antiphrastic sign with a truth of its own signifying at least (like Hawthorne’s Puritan-oblique Hester Prynne) divergence from male/hieratic hermeneutics; at most (like Apuleius’s metaphysical Psyche, Hawthorne’s lodestar) ineffable, philosophical Good. As if to the generating premise, Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Without an eye to read them[,] signs produce no concepts”; socially consequential signification-conditioned transformation, in that eye and toward those signifieds, symptomatic both historical and rhetorical, is here assayed.
References
Abélard, Peter C. 1132. Historia calamitatum (Petrus Abaelardus, Ad amicum suum consolatoria). https://www.intratext.com/IXT/LAT0428/_PH.HTM (accessed 25 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Apuleius. c. 170. 2nd century. Asinus Aureus (The Golden Ass). https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/apuleius (accessed 23 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Astell, Ann W. 2003. Joan of Arc and sacrificial authorship. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Search in Google Scholar
Baring, Ann & Jules Cashford. 1991. The myth of the goddess. London: Viking.Search in Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1957. Myth today. In Mythologies, Annette Lavers (trans.), 109–164. New York: Hill and Wang.10.4135/9781446269534.n5Search in Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1972. The imagination of the sign. In Roland Barthes: Critical essays, Richard Howard (trans.), 205–212. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. 1968. The Blithedale romance: A radical reading. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67. 545–569.Search in Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. 1986. The Scarlet Letter: A reading. Boston: Twayne.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1969. Diabolus in Salem. English Language Notes 6. 280–285.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1972. The image of America: From Hermeneutics to Symbolism. Bucknell Review 20(2). 3–12.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1975. The puritan origins of the American self. New Haven: Yale University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1976. How the puritans won the American revolution. Massachusetts Review 17(4). 629–630.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1978. The American Jeremiad. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1988. The a-politics of ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter. New Literary History 19(3). 609–654. https://doi.org/10.2307/469093.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1991. The office of The Scarlet Letter. Baltimore, MD: Johns-Hopkins University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1993. The rites of assent. New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1996. The Scarlet Letter: A twice-told tale. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 22(2). 1–20.Search in Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 2004. Democratic aesthetics: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In Matthew Sweney & Michal Peprník (eds.), Popular culture and democracy, 15–36. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouc.Search in Google Scholar
Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. Work on myth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The masks of God: Creative mythology. New York: Viking.Search in Google Scholar
Carver, Robert H. F. 2007. The protean ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217861.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Cassirer, Ernst. 1970 [1953]. The platonic renaissance in England, James P. Pettegrove (ed.). New York: Gordian Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cheney, Edward P. 1962. The dawn of a new era, 1250–1453. New York: Harpers.Search in Google Scholar
Coletti, Teresa. 1988. Naming the rose: Eco, Medieval signs, and modern theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1976 [1967]. Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins University Press.10.2307/j.ctv1168ch3.38Search in Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. 1984. The name of the rose, William Weaver (trans.). New York: Harcourt.Search in Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Evelyn-White, Hugh G. (trans.). 1914. Homeric hymn to Demeter. London: Loeb Library. https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/demeter.htm (accessed 23 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Feldman, Burton & Robert D. Richardson (eds.). 1972. Margaret Fuller and her friends. In The rise of modern mythology, 1680–1860, 519–522. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Fraioli, Deborah. 2000. Peter Bayle’s reflections on a much discussed woman: The Heloise article in the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. In Bonnie Wheeler (ed.), Listening to Heloise: The voice of a twelfth-century woman, 341–361. New York: St. Martin’s.10.1007/978-1-349-61874-3_15Search in Google Scholar
Georgiana, Linda. 2000. “In any corner of heaven”: Heloise’s critique of monastic life. In Bonnie Wheeler (ed.), Listening to Heloise: The voice of a twelfth-century woman, 187–217. New York: St. Martin’s.10.1007/978-1-349-61874-3_8Search in Google Scholar
Gilson, Étienne. 1960 [1948]. Heloise and Abelard, L. K. Shook (trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.10.3998/mpub.6623Search in Google Scholar
Gordon, Mary. 2000. Joan of Arc. New York: Viking.Search in Google Scholar
Haverford. 2015. Rescriptum Heloissae Ad Abaelardum. https://iris.haverford.edu/postclassical/files/2015/08/Heloisa-Abelard-IV.pdf (accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1851. A wonder-book for girls and boys and Tanglewood tales for girls and boys, being a second wonder-book. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields.Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1883. Mosses from an old manse, 2nd edn., Edinburgh: William Paterson.Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1946 [1843]. The birthmark. In Newton Arvin (ed.), Hawthorne’s short stories, 147–165. New York: Vintage.Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1968 [1853]. Tanglewood tales, being a second wonder-book. New York: Airmont.Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1974. French and Italian note-books. (Centenary edition of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 14), William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce & Claude M. Simpson (eds.). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1978 [1850]. The scarlet letter, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long & Seymour Gross (eds.). New York: Norton.Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1978 [1852]. The Blithedale romance, Seymour Gross & Rosalie Murphy (eds.). New York: Norton.10.2307/j.ctv22jnrmrSearch in Google Scholar
Huizinga, Johann. 1984 [1959]. Men and ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9781400858088Search in Google Scholar
Lawrence, D. H. 1953 [1923]. Studies in classic American literature. New York: Doubleday.Search in Google Scholar
Lefcowitz, Barbara F. & Allan B. Lefcowitz. 1966. Some rents in the veil: Priscilla and Zenobia. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21. 263–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932589.Search in Google Scholar
Male, Roy R. 1964. The pastoral wasteland: The Blithedale Romance. In Hawthorne’s tragic vision, 139–156. New York: Norton.Search in Google Scholar
Mathiessen, Francis Otto. 1941. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Newman, Barbara. 2011. Authority, authenticity, and the repression of Heloise. Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Studies 22. 46–75.10.9783/9780812200263.46Search in Google Scholar
Northrop, Frye. 1976. The secular scripture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Paglia, Camille. 1991. Sexual personae. New York: Vintage.Search in Google Scholar
Phillips, John A. 1984. Eve: The history of an idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row.Search in Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1968 [1761]. Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, Judith H. McDowell (trans.). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Scaglione, Aldo D. 1963. Nature and love in the late middle ages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.10.2307/3042703Search in Google Scholar
Skinner, Marilyn B. 1996. Zeus and Leda. Thamyris 3(1). 103–123.10.1163/9789004649965_008Search in Google Scholar
Splendora, Anthony. 2013. Psyche and Hester: Apotheosis and epitome. Rupkatha 5(3). 1–25.Search in Google Scholar
Turner, Arlin. 1958. Introduction. In The Blithedale Romance. New York: Norton.Search in Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. 1904. Personal recollections of Joan of Arc. New York: Harper Bros.Search in Google Scholar
Wheeler Bonnie (ed.). 2000. Listening to Heloise: The voice of a twelfth-century woman. New York: St. Martin’s.10.1007/978-1-349-61874-3Search in Google Scholar
Wilson, Katharina & Glenda McLeod. 2000. Textual strategies in the Abelard/Heloise correspondence.10.1007/978-1-349-61874-3_5Search in Google Scholar
Winkler, John K. 1985. Auctor & actor: A narratological reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Berkeley: University of California Press.Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Re charged emblems: Hawthorne and semiotic metamorphics
- The spectrum of subjectal forms: Towards an Integral Semiotics
- Peirce, Aristotle, metaphor – and comments to Factor
- Charles Peirce and firstness: The category of origins
- Image and word as forms of iconic depiction
- Embodied ekphrasis of experience: Bodily rhetoric in mediating affect in interaction
- Semeiotic time
- “In my head, I have a cleaning lady:” Symbol form and symbolic intention in the everyday use of money
- The form of the traditional bamboo house in the Makassar culture: A cultural semiotic study
- Garroni, the late Peirce, and the issue of creativity
- Collocational semiosis in the academic discourse of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): The case of AFRICA
- Book Review
- In the footsteps of the semiotic school of Moscow-Tartu / Tartu-Moscow: Evaluations and perspectives
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Re charged emblems: Hawthorne and semiotic metamorphics
- The spectrum of subjectal forms: Towards an Integral Semiotics
- Peirce, Aristotle, metaphor – and comments to Factor
- Charles Peirce and firstness: The category of origins
- Image and word as forms of iconic depiction
- Embodied ekphrasis of experience: Bodily rhetoric in mediating affect in interaction
- Semeiotic time
- “In my head, I have a cleaning lady:” Symbol form and symbolic intention in the everyday use of money
- The form of the traditional bamboo house in the Makassar culture: A cultural semiotic study
- Garroni, the late Peirce, and the issue of creativity
- Collocational semiosis in the academic discourse of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): The case of AFRICA
- Book Review
- In the footsteps of the semiotic school of Moscow-Tartu / Tartu-Moscow: Evaluations and perspectives