< previous page page_48 next page >

Page 48
As for contemporary semiotic theories, from the beginning they took into account the pragmatic moment. Even without speaking of the central role played by interpretation and "unlimited semiosis" in Peirce's thought, it would be enough to remark that Charles Morris in Foundations of a Theory of Signs (1938) reminded that a reference to the role of the interpreter was always present in Greek and Latin rhetoric, in the communication theory of the Sophists, in Aristotle, not to mention Augustine, for whom signs were characterized by the fact that they produce an idea in the mind of their receiver.
During the 1960s, many Italian semiotic approaches were influenced by sociological studies on the reception of mass media. In 1965, at the convention held in Perugia on the relationship between television and its audience, I, Paolo Fabbri, and others insisted that it is not enough to study what a message says according to the code of its senders but is also necessary to study what it says according to the codes of its addressees (the idea of "aberrant decoding," proposed at that time, was further elaborated in Eco 1968 and 1976).
Thus in the 1960s the problem of reception was posited (or re-posited) by semiotics as a reaction against (i) the structuralistic idea that a textual object was something independent of its interpretations and (ii) the stiffness of many formal semantics flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon area, where the meaning of terms and sentences was studied independently of their context. Only later were the dictionary-like semantics challenged by encyclopedia-like models that tried to introduce into the core of the semantic representation pragmatic elements alsoand only recently have cognitive sciences and Artificial Intelligence decided that an encyclopedic model seems to be the most convenient way to represent meaning and to process texts (on this debate, see Eco, 1976, 1984, as well as Eco et al., eds., 1988). In order to reach such an awareness it has been necessary that linguistics move toward pragmatic phenomena, and in this sense the role of the speech-act theory should not be underestimated. 1
In the literary domain, Wolfgang Iser (1972) was probably the first to acknowledge the convergence between the new linguistic perspectives and the literary theory of reception, devoting as he did a whole chapter of Der Akt des Lesens to the problems raised by Austin and Searle (five years before the first organic attempt, by Pratt [1977], to elaborate a theory of literary discourse based on the speech-act theory).
Thus what Jauss (1969) was announcing as a profound change in the paradigm of literary scholarship was in fact a general change taking place in the semiotic paradigm in generaleven though this

 
< previous page page_48 next page >