Discourse in the Novel

Breaking the book: print humanities in the digital age

Between 1988 and 1993, Yuri Lotman composed a series of reflections on “the voice of the anonymous mass”: a collective voice that, in particular situations linked to a cultural crisis, is the bearer of striking passions, which can deeply influence history. In his late works, the Russian semiotician postulated, therefore, the idea of a semiotics of emotions as an object of study to understand the dynamics of culture, especially during periods perceived as revolutionary or transitional―namely, when the anonymous mass manipulates the events or, when looking back, gives them a distorted interpretation. Lotman focused in particular on the relationship between great historical fractures, the self-propagating mechanisms of fear, and the cultural creation of scapegoats. This paper is devoted to framing Lotman’s reflection on persecution, paying particular attention to women during the phenomenon of the witch hunt.

/pdf/lotman-continua-a-surpreender-revolucoes-e-emocoes-coletivas-3gobtru0rj.pdf

Lótman continua a surpreender: revoluções e emoções coletivas

As a consequence of the specific nature of Peirce's philosophical view, the literary text need not be set against semiotic theory; instead, it may be situated in such a way as to prolong the sign and the movement of semiosis. In the first instance, the author investigates the manifestation of the literary object within Peirce's semiotic discourse. Several references to Emerson's famous poem 'The Sphinx' are analyzed. This is followed by an analysis of three recurring literary figures: Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, and Chevalier Dupin. It becomes obvious that Peirce had a significant knowledge of these figures but, more importantly, this leads to recognizing the affinity that exists between such literary projects and Peirce's semeiotic: the latter seemingly feeding off the fictional nature of such literary works in constituting itself as a full-fledged semiotic discourse. In the second part of the article, the author examines two theoretical themes such as they develop within two classical literary works: aspects of Firstness (feelings and potentiality) with regards to the famous 'Madeleine' episode in Proust (Du cote de chez Swann); and an excess of iconicity such that it inhibits any movement of semiosis in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher.

Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors

Epigraph: Problems in the Study of Language and Literature

The paper examines the problem of textual/cultural dynamics linked to the issue of semiotic literariness , to be further investigated by the authors in later papers on literary semiotics. This scientific project aims to get closer to reaching an adequate disciplinary identification for semiotics of literature and a relatively precise definition of the status of this field in relation to semiotics of culture. The first step for the project is to reveal the interrelationhip between text and culture using the notion of dynamics that can be reconstructed from a historical perspective through some essential components of Formalist and Structuralist theory (Tynyanov’s ‘function’, Jakobson’s ‘dominant’) and also works by Lotman (the ‘text–culture’ relationship) and Bakhtin (‘dialogue’). The notions of inclusiveness/integration, distancing and hierarchization, leading to transformation, are interpreted in some detail in the context of these theories. On these grounds, three basic categories of the analysability of textual/cultural dynamics are set up with the indication of further aspects of the dynamic function: (1) mediation; (2) transposition; (3) temporality–spatiality. The suggested classification and the implied conceptual segmentation are expected to contribute to a synthesis between “Structuralist” and Peircean theoretical and methodological orientations in semiotic literary studies. This also reveals the need for a coexistence of approaches (a) moving from particular cultural fields (literary culture tradition) towards general semiotics of culture, and (b) returning from universal transfield concepts to literary culture, including the historical traditions both in art (object-level) and its scientific interpretation (meta-level).

/pdf/text-dynamics-renewing-challenges-for-semiotics-of-lv6j8qlvxn.pdf

Text dynamics: Renewing challenges for semiotics of literature

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure is elucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee.

The cultural mediational dynamics of literary intertexts: An approach to the problem of generative and transformational dynamics

The paper examines Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky continuing the discussion of the problem of character type already raised in previous works by the author of this presentation, relating to the explanation of nihilism as a typical semantic construct in 19th-century Russian literature. Within this framework the character typology is approached in the light of its definition in terms of the linguistic formulation of the idea of nihilism through motifs representing Russian cultural universals, such as boredom, deed [delo], etc. This kind of reading makes it possible to interpret the philosophical, psychological, moral sides of the questions treated by the underground man by revealing the semantic dynamics of the systematic combination of motifs of negation and affirmation (for the collective motif invariant with its variants see all–nothing [vsjo–nichego]). The analysis looks at the semantic doubling of the crucial motifs of Dostoevsky’s work (word [slovo], deed [delo], directness [neposredstvennost’]) in certain lexical units and syntactic compositions, underlying their semantic cohesion with the characterisation of the protagonist’s verbal behaviour (cf. the implicit metaphor of the behavioural word) and the poetic conceptualisation of time (the beginning and the end with the metaphorisation of time in the sense of the extremes). The creative consciousness of the underground man out of his world- and self-interpretation in static dichotomies and polarly contrasted pairs creates a process, the development of which in the course of writing his notes – and then the Notes… – systematically relies on reciprocally inclusive semantic poles. At the same time, the relationship between the temporal point and process is semantically reevaluated in the dynamics of semiotic evolution of motifs and their textual arrangement into semantic patterns reinterpreting the idea of nihilism. In this way the relationship between the semantisations of the protagonist’s pre-underground, underground and post-underground periods are revealed, leading to the understanding of the semantic transformation of the idea of deed / to do (delo /delat’) into that of the process of being done (delat’sja) as related to the personality in terms of the semiotics of text-creation and the work of the creative subject.

https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/meslav/article/download/17611/15436

«Человек же с характером, деятель…» – «подпольный» человек в контексте семантического определения нигилизма

Abstract The paper raises the problem of binarisms in Juri Lotman’s conceptual and text analytical system from a new perspective. The approach combines several focal aspects of examination. It consist of the parallel study of the application of the notion of binarism in cultural semiotic theory and its active role as a crucial methodological tool for literary text interpretation (the question is: how binary notions in scientific interpretive metatexts are related to the examined culture texts and traditions). Binary models are put into a context of ternary models as interpreted by J. Lotman and B. Uspensky in their 1977 article “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (until the End of the Eighteenth Century).” The theory expounded by the two scholars is compared with Lotman’s overview of Russian literature of the classical period (1992) where he gives further details on the two models manifesting themselves in 19th-century authors’ poetics. In the paper, the role of the neutral, inbetween semantic sphere is accorded special attention so as to clarify the real nature of Lotman’s suggestion in indentifying the meaning-creative energy of this middle, mediatory semantic zone. Through the investigation, the coherence of Lotman’s oeuvre is revealed, which refutes the possibility of interpreting the functionalisation of binary notions and their different uses within the framework of the structuralist or the poststructuralis paradigm. The universal cultural nature of thinking in oppositions is interpreted in concrete terms of the semiotic principles of meaning-engendering, explaining the issues of semantic difference (deviation), meaning-transformation (text-dynamics), the shift from binarism to plurality, and semiotic mediation. The paper ends with outlining future perspectives in the investigation of the problem of binarisms. 

/pdf/on-some-aspects-of-the-binary-in-the-context-of-the-ternary-3byndxli.pdf

On some aspects of the binary in the context of the ternary and the plural in Juri Lotman’s semiotics of literature

/pdf/lotman-in-the-context-of-semiotic-literary-criticism-wa967q32.pdf

Lotman in the context of semiotic literary criticism: Introduction

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Katalin Kroó

Author Tools

Chat about Author