Jrgen Dines Johansen
Preface
This collection of articles is, as the title of this special issue of Semiotica reveals, about the semiotics of literature. However, not every branch of literary semiotics is equally well represented in this issue. The reason is that it has been my intention to present a few approaches to literary semiotics, primarily that of Peircean semiotics and those of continental phenomenology and cognitive studies. Hence the structuralist tradition within literary semiotics is less well represented. It is certainly not absent, it has inspired and/or is discussed in several articles (e.g. Bundgaard, Bundgaard and Ostergaard, Davidsen, Grünbaum, Herman, Hogan, Ryan, and Stjernfelt and Zeuthen). So, even if it has been my ambition here to present different approaches, I would like to state that I find it old-fashioned and harmful to perpetuate sometimes confrontations between different semiotic ‘schools.’ And especially, with regard to the semiotics of literature, it would be foolish not to recognize the value and importance of the structuralist approach. After all, a linguistically based semiotics is well tuned to deal with important aspects of literature; and research by, for instance, Barthes, Genette, Greimas, Kristeva, Todorov, and onwards from the French tradition has contributed very substantially to the scholarly study of literature. It is further interesting that the present cognitive study of literature has affinities with both the structuralist and the Peircean tradition within semiotics.
Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2007, 06/2007
Pages: 1 - 10
Show full article (external site)
Show all available items of this journal
Search
