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noteworthy contribution toward the clarification of many semiotic problems. To take only one example, Wolfgang Iser has largely based his semiotic theory of the Implied Reader upon the researches of Joycean criticism. |
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The second reason is that semiotics in its first phase of development usually analyzed isolated sentences, dialogues, newspaper stories, trivialliteratur, and even when it has approached texts with aesthetic ends, it has preferred to work on more traditional narrative works. This is so because a semiotics of literature was first of all interested in acknowledging rules, codes, and systems of conventions. In order to analyze works such as those of Joyce, which question rules, codes, and systems of conventions, it is first necessary to have clear ideas on what is being questioned. In other words, it would seem that to establish a semiotics of the avant-garde it would first be useful to establish a semiotics of tradition. |
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2. Semiotic Problems in Joyce |
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I think, on the contrary, that the whole opus of Joyce is a paramount playground for semiotic research. |
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Since linguistics isolates and analyzes, alongside grammatical sentences, also the ungrammatical ones, Joyce is able to offer endless examples of deviations from phonological, lexical, syntactic, and narrative rules. |
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Text semiotics, for example, is interested in the rules of coherence and cohesiveness of a given text. It seems problematic to say what is wrong in the expression John came home very late. Napoleon died in St. Helena. Such texts are usually scored as grammatically correct but textually incoherent. Naturally, linguists and semioticians know that similar texts can become coherent if they are seen as a part of a larger textual environment that in some way makes the lateness of John relevant to the death of Napoleon, or vice versa. But the problem of text semiotics is to ascertain by which strategies a context signals its topic or its aboutness. Now, every instance of stream of consciousness in Ulysses is the paramount playing ground for this kind of analysis. |
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In text pragmatics, scholars are puzzled by the different truth value of metaphors and symbols. A metaphor is easily recognizable as such because, if it were taken literally, it would not tell the truth (since it is not true that Achilles was a lion). The symbolic mode is, on the contrary, instantiated when a text describes behaviors, objects and events that make sense literally but when, nevertheless, the reader feels them to |
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