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Barend van Heusden

Semiosis, art, and literature

Keywords: semiosis, culture, art, literature, Entertainment, mimesis

The ‘state of literature’ in a visual culture is analyzed against the background of a theoretical semiotic framework based upon the distinction between three types of signs: one-place images, two-place symbols, and three-place structures. It is argued that literature is linguistic mimetic meta-representation. The semiotic perspective allows us to deal, in a productive way, with a number of key issues in literary theory (such as ‘literariness,’ literature versus entertainment, and literary diachrony). Moreover, a methodology for the study of literature and the arts in culture is proposed, consisting of three complementary approaches or ‘strategies’: the phenomenological, the hermeneutical, and the empirical.

Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2007, 06/2007
Pages: 133 - 147

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