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9
Joyce, Semiosis, and Semiotics |
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During the last years many critics have tried to apply semiotic tools to Joyce, and with interesting results (for further bibliographical information, see Bosinelli et al. 1986). But I am convinced that, if one were to took at a complete Joycean bibliography of the last twenty years, one would remark that those critics represent a generous but modest percentage. A parallel inquiry into a complete bibliography of theoretical semiotics, narratology, and text pragmatics would lead to the same results: despite many interesting exceptions, only a modest percentage of theoretical semioticians have drawn their examples and evidence from Joyce's works. Among the "pilgrim fathers" of semiotics, Roland Barthes has subtly analyzed Balzac; Greimas has carefully scrutinized Maupassant; Jakobson has carried out acute analyses of Baudelaire and Shakespeare; and others similarly have analyzed Faulkner, Becket, and Borges. Literary semiotics has left little territory unviolated, but Joyce has been confined to a region where only a few courageous pioneers have dared to venture. |
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Naturally, reasons can be sought for this silence. The first is that much of traditional Joycean criticism, even while uninterested in semiotic theory, working on an author who has put into question the very structure of language and all the rules of narrativity, had already made a |
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A longer version of this chapter was presented at the James Joyce Society Symposium, Venice, 1988. |
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