The Construction of Meaning

WHAT DOES SEMIOTICS HAVE to offer to the study of literature? The question is legitimate from the point o view of literary criticism, but it is quite problematic for the semiotician, who knows full well that, to the critic, semiotics and are two distinct entities, opposable to each other, if not structurally at least historically, whereas for him there is no such thing as but only texts or signifying practices which, at a given time and for a given community (of readers, publishers, scholars, etc.), have been classed as literary. He may therefore be tempted to reply Socratically with a question of his own: Tell me what you mean by literature, and I shall tell you what I have to offer. This gesture, though not as empty or gratuitous as may seem at first sight, lacks economy: there are likely to be as many definitions of as there are questioners. Any form of discourse upon anything posited as the object of this discourse implies some ontology of that object--even if only to subvert it-and semiotics is no exception. Although semiotics aspires to be a science, i.e., a homogeneous and coherent discourse capable of self-correcting and incremental development, semioticians know that its medium is language, the locus of uncertainty, lies, heterogeneity, and incoherence. It shares this predicament with all other sciences, but it is the only one to recognize it as such and to attempt to devise a modus vivendi with it. In other words, semiotics wants to formulate a unified approach to the problematics of signification and meaning, although it knows at the outset that sign and meaning never coincide. To address itself to the legitimacy of the question posed at the beginning, semiotics must reformulate it: do not ask what does semiotics offer to the study of but ask what sort of literature does semiotics offer, i.e., what is the model of which is implied in semiotic theory and practice? To my knowledge, no semiotician has considered this question, and this should not be surprising given the tentative character of most serious semiotic writing. It must be stressed that the preoccupation of semioticians is with semiotics, and that although literary texts figure prominently among their concerns, they are rarely at the center of them, so that the view of which emerges from semiotic practice is very much in the nature of an offering, a secondary by-product of an

Epistemology · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy

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