Umberto Eco’s semiotics of the text: Theoretical observations and an analysis of the parable of the banquet
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Stefano Traini
Abstract
In this article I have attempted to use Umberto Eco’s semiotics of the text in order to analyze the famous “parable of the banquet,” which has come down to us in three versions from the gospels of Luke (14,15–24), Matthew (22,1–14) and Thomas (logion 64). In particular I have tried to consider (i) the socio-cultural context, or in other words the Sitz im Leben of the community within which the parable was written; (ii) the narrative structure of the parable, with the narrative nodes that stimulate the reader to cooperate in the work of interpretation and to draw inferences; (iii) the way in which the Model Author is portrayed in the text; (iv) the kind of Model Reader who is prefigured in the parable. The analysis has shown how in the parable of the banquet, the original level (deriving directly from the preaching of Jesus) characterized by a salvationist and social slant is always overlaid with another level that is hortatory, pedagogical or ecclesiological, and which takes on different connotations according to the different contexts. Generally the Evangelists are suggesting to their communities that they make changes in their behavior ranging from renunciation of wealth to the resetting of social ties, from a stance of constant vigilance to the practice of an active faith, from healthy detachment from worldly frivolity to a rigorous asceticism. Thus the editorial layers reveal differing narrative nodes in function of particular interpretative responses, different Model Authors and different Model Readers.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Ejecting protestors, interpellating supporters: The interactional pragmatics of expulsion at Trump’s campaign rallies
- What is political semiotics and why does it matter? A reply to Janar Mihkelsaar
- Iconic processes and intermediality in the photobooks Silent Book and Sí por Cuba
- From shipwreck to constellation: Rethinking Meillassoux on Mallarmé from a semiotic perspective
- Umberto Eco’s semiotics of the text: Theoretical observations and an analysis of the parable of the banquet
- The search for the imperfect language
- Semiospheric translation types reconsidered from the translation semiotics perspective
- Voicing control: A child resource for “growing a head taller”
- Kenneth Waltz talks through Mark Rothko: Visual metaphors in the discipline of International Relations Theory
- The cultural transformation of the proprioceptive senses
- On the embodied meaning of emotional responses to music: A semiotic perspective
- Asemic typography in kinetic design
- Topological and networked visibility: Politics of seeing in the digital age
- A semiosic translation of Paul Celan’s Schwarze Flocken and Weggebeizt
