The new literary semiotics

Veivo, Harri

doi:10.1515/sem.2007.031

Semiotica

2007

DOI: 10.1515/sem.2007.031

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The new literary semiotics

Harri Veivo¹

Abstract: This article argues that for the past ten or fifteen years literary semiotics has been in a new phase of development. The adoption of Charles Peirce's pragmatic semiotics as the frame theory for research on literary semiosis has opened up new questions and topics for analysis and facilitated a return to essential concerns neglected by the earlier approaches. Three lines of interrogation emerge as central from work done to date: analysis of language-world relationship, imaginative reading, and interpretation as… Show more

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…The author adds that the sign is a mediating element that establishes a relationship between other elements. 10 Ponzio expands on this by noting that the meaning of a sign is a response, an "interpretant that calls for another response, another interpretant," and concludes that this implies the dialogic nature of sign and semiosis. 11 For Eliot, essential, or intrinsic, meaning outran the conventional language resources available: signification, on the other hand-or the expanded notional field provided when images are portrayed as signs-presented the poet with a rhetorical device for achieving greater semantic accuracy within the confines of an adjoining linguistic framework.…”

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Dialect of the Tribe: Modes of Communication and the Epiphanic Role of Nonhuman Imagery in T. S. Eliot'sFour Quartets*

Penny

2015

H. Theolo. Review

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In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets an attempt is made to investigate—often in a discursive manner—notions of time, language, and the divine. Yet the poet is hindered by certain limitations: words—as a primary vehicle of expression—collapse under the pressure, frequently sabotaging attempts at true articulation as detailed in the poem's opening quartet, Burnt Norton: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension. . .” (V: 149–51). Consequently, the medium of language itself frames an apparent contradiction throughout the Quartets: how a contrived system can represent notions intrinsically elusive and ephemeral. This conundrum inculcates all four of the poems, making them in some ways the ironic frame of their own reference. Despite this inherent dilemma, Eliot recognized that harnessing certain imagery—both animate and inanimate—and exploiting it for its numinous qualities was indispensable to achieving his aesthetic and thematic aims. Such imagery included elements taken from the natural world which pointed beyond their own outward forms to some ideal form that lay behind them. It was an approach motivated in part by what Frye describes as the poet's concern with Heraclitean logos zynos—or a “common logos”—and had as its aim the participation of man in the divine. To achieve such ends, Eliot relied on bird calls, echoes, bones, bells, and other seemingly prosaic phenomena and transformed them into conduits by which revelations might occur. That is, certain central images the poet adopts in Four Quartets—though not endowed with the capacity for human language—are nevertheless engendered with communicativeness of a uniquely numinous kind. Aligned with this notion was Eliot's belief that the way to commune with the past and with the divine was through ritual; by employing common natural objects and investing each with sacramental significance, the poet was able to evoke a temporal link with the ineffable world. It was also a means of reconciling what he perceived as the disjuncture with conventional language. By grounding the effort in an approach reminiscent of sacred Christian ritual and aesthetically portraying a new mode of communication consistent with transformative ceremony, Eliot aimed at the restoration of a past community of values. This highly distinct mode of communing came to represent its own unique type of langue, carrying forward thematic concerns while at the same time detailing a stylistic approach to poetic composition not prevalent in Eliot's earlier work.

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confidence: 99%

Dialect of the Tribe: Modes of Communication and the Epiphanic Role of Nonhuman Imagery in T. S. Eliot'sFour Quartets*

Penny

2015

H. Theolo. Review

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“…Indexicality of Emotions in Literary Experience” by Sirkka Knuuttila (in Ljungberg, Veivo et al 2009). …”

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Feelings in Literature

Johansen

2010

Integr. psych. behav.

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In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices.

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The new literary semiotics

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

Dialect of the Tribe: Modes of Communication and the Epiphanic Role of Nonhuman Imagery in T. S. Eliot'sFour Quartets*

Dialect of the Tribe: Modes of Communication and the Epiphanic Role of Nonhuman Imagery in T. S. Eliot'sFour Quartets*

Feelings in Literature

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