A Semiotic Definition of Aesthetic Experience and the Period Code of Modernism

In the absence of a consensus of what literature is and how it is to be defined, many students of literature believe that the problem can be circumvented by disregarding the literary nature of their object. This tendency has given rise first to narratology, which is concerned with narrative, irrespective of whether it is received as being literary or nonliterary, and second to the study of texts in general (text grammar, Textwissenschaft, etc.), which includes the examination of all texts, narrative as well as nonnarrative, literary as well as nonliterary. The widening of the object originates in justified doubts about the possibility of identifying the aesthetic properties of texts, even of texts which have been received as literary by many generations of readers. However, anyone interested in the poetics of fiction cannot ignore those qualities of narrative which have triggered an aesthetic response among substantial groups of readers. We accept the view that, in principle, every text (in fact every random occurrence) may occasion an aesthetic experience in the recipient, if the latter is favorably disposed toward such an experience and is meeting the stimulus of text (or occurrence) under conditions which allow aesthetic perception. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that some texts are received as being literary more often than others; the nature of the text is not indifferent with respect to the response it is most likely to elicit among a particular readership at a particular time. It appears that in literary communication the aesthetic experience is conditioned by a constellation of factors, of which both the nature of the text, and the experience

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Grammar · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Narrativity · Perception · Poetics · Poetry · Semiotics · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Semiotics and Representation Studies

• Modernismo/Modernidad y el Proyecto de Alzar la Nación

  Ivan A Schulman•Journal of Iberian & Latin…•1998

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