Multidisciplinary Approach to the Texts: Semiotic Analysis of the Process of Meaning Construction in O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi (original) (raw)

Act of signification from narratology to semiotics within the scope of interdisciplinary approach

Act of signification from narratology to semiotics within the scope of interdisciplinary approach, 2020

Narratives, which were previously addressed and tried to be explained with a single approach and an application model of a field, have become more comprehensive with the combination of different types of approaches and practices from different disciplines today. One of the remarkable advantages of such interdisciplinary studies is that the approaches of other disciplines support the research process, where the data of a particular discipline is unsatisfactory. This advantage, offered by interdisciplinary studies, is also valid in the examination of the systems of works of art. The importance of literature in the development of the aforementioned art system cannot be denied. There are distinctive literary genres comprising specific messages in their semantic universe and serve as a communication bridge between the author and reader. The common point of these works is that they are fictional narratives. The function of narratology and semiotics is to examine the formation processes of such narratives. Although the implementation processes, analysis tools, and procedures are various, the common ground of both disciplines is to study narrated structures. In fact, two different mono narrative studies can be realized by dealing with those disciplines within their own systems separately. However, the main focus of this study is to take the advantage of using the data of both disciplines to reach an applicable analysis model that prioritizes interdisciplinarity in the study of narrative analysis.

Theory and Practice: Literary Semiotics and Text Analysis

Current Studies in Foreign Language Education, 2023

Today, all kinds of instructive or artistic texts that contain a specific message, regardless of the field, have emerged through the meaningful sequence of signs. For instance, an anatomy text for the medical sciences, a physics text for the engineering sciences, or a biology text for the natural sciences can be given as examples for the instructive text type. The other type of text appears in the artistic field, which has a robust aesthetic side and requires interpretation. On the other hand, the sub-texts that contribute to forming the central texts in the artistic field are generally narrative and representational texts. Along with the instructive texts produced by verbal and/or nonverbal signs, artistic texts have also become an essential part of the teaching/learning process. Many of the texts are frequently used as supplementary material in language classrooms. Thus, artistic texts make thematic or linguistic achievement and signification processes active and promote the teaching/learning continuum. It is possible to shape the adjuvant process with different theoretical backgrounds, methods, and techniques. One of these theories is semiotics: New ways of thinking, understanding, and interpretation methods have been developed throughout human history. Humans produce meaningful structures and use various methods to comprehend them efficiently. Semiotics has gained importance as one of the study fields that analyzes conditions of sign production and their meanings. It is one of the critical scientific fields of the twenty-first century that attempts to explain the facts and phenomena of different systems belonging to nature and culture. In recent years, semiotics has interacted with different fields of science and daily life thanks to the studies done by semioticians. Thus, the study field has been associated with different disciplines, leading to increased interdisciplinary studies. Therefore, semiotics is a field of science that can signify many systems from social sciences to engineering sciences, from fine arts to natural sciences, from human sciences to everyday life (Kalelioğlu, 2023, pp. 109-110). Semiotics closely relates to all fields of science and paves the way for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. However, perhaps since there is the investigation of an abstract concept of “meaning” at the core of semiotics, there are not many researchers and practitioners in our country who conduct studies in semiotics and transfer the results of the studies to the in-classroom teaching/learning period. For this reason, one of the key objectives of this study is to propose an applicable methodology on how semiotic theory, techniques, and analysis instruments can be used in research and classroom practice. Since the object of this study is a literary artwork, we placed a short story genre, which is more of a narrative text type, at the center of the investigation. “The Lottery”, written by Shirley Jackson, has been selected for this study. Throughout the study, how meaning is constructed in various semantic layers within the formation process and how each layer is articulated to form the semantic universe of the text by the author of the narrative will be addressed.

Literary Translation as Semiotic Interpretation in the Light of Philological Hermeneutics

Armenian Folia Anglistika

In recent years translation and particularly the translation of literature is perceived as interpretation. Several decades ago, Roman Jacobson put forward the idea of translation as semiotic interpretation distinguishing between in intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translations. While intralingual translation is the translation of verbal signs with the help of other signs, and inter-lingual translation is the interpretation of the verbal signs of one language with those of another language, intersemiotic translation is the interpretation of the verbal signs by means of non-verbal sign systems. Hence, according to the rule of extralinguistic signs, the main concern of the one who studies a piece of translation is the examination of the extralinguistic phenomena which have ensured the existence of the overall vertical context. The semiotic study of the original and the translation insists on revealing the vertical context, i.e. the literary, aesthetic, moral values and thei...

What are we appealing to? A semiotic Approach to the Notion of Context in literary Studies

Kodikas/Code, 2017

Against the background of the ongoing trend in literary and cultural studies to "contextualize" objects of study in relation to other material and for a certain purpose, the paper examines the notion of context in literary studies 1.) from a disciplinary point of view and 2.) from the vantage point of the analytical topic of borderline vagueness and its (implicit) treatment in Peircean semiotics. After showing that the notion of context does not lack any sharpness of definition, and, therefore, cannot be any further clarified, it is argued that the persistent methodological shortcomings of contextualization are due to the inherent vagueness of the phenomenon of context itself. Any perceived uncertainty about correct procedures of contextualization is neither a matter of increase in precision nor of quantitative considerations, but the result of a fundamental indecisiveness rooted in the phenomenon of context. It is consequently best dealt with by an appeal to generality, understood in terms of Peircean semiotics as the further reduction of interdisciplinary and intersubjective boundaries. Borderline vagueness proper involves a lack of communication (and isolation of research), which is why the paper argues against any such psychologism and for the application of stricter procedures of semiotic generalization to any given approach to interpretation and terminological work in literary and cultural studies.

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SEMIOTIC APPROACHES TO THE NOTION OF TEXTUAL COMMUNICATION BETWEEN AN AUTHOR AND A READER (A. J. GREIMAS, F. RASTIER, J. KRISTEVA)

Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Philosophy, 2022

This article concentrates on a couple of semiotic approaches working out, on the one hand, the mediated character of reducing interpretative trajectories to the actual translation into the language of narratives (A. J. Greimas) or the language of textuality (F. Rastier), and, on the other, the direct, apparently unmediated passage to the visceral physicality of the verbal signifying system, which make semantic and syntactic components perfunctory to interpretation in a way (J. Kristeva). Greimassian universal narrative grammar dismantles signifying units, navigating in the network of narrative utterances. Rastier's approach structures textual artifacts by unearthing semantic constituents crucial for semiotic analysis. Kristeva examines what is behind the curtain instead of sorting out the significance of the text's content as a special category and the possibility of procedure allowing its interpretation. These three authors are compared in the context of two approaches that come to grips with the author/reader pair.