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Six of the nine essays published in this book were written between 1959 and 1971. "The Poetics of the Open Work" (Chapter 1) and "The Myth of Superman" (Chapter 4)written respectively in 1959 and in 1962, before I fully developed my semiotic approachrepresent two opposing aspects of my interest in the dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts. The introductory essay of this book makes clear what I mean today by such a categorial polarity and how I see it as a special case of a more general semiotic phenomenon: the cooperative role of the addressee in interpreting messages. |
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"The Poetics of the Open Work" deals with various sorts of texts, but all the other essays collected here concern verbal texts. "The Semantics of Metaphor" (Chapter 2) and "On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language" (Chapter 3)both of 1971examine how the procedures of aesthetic manipulation of language produce the interpretive cooperation of the addressee. The two essays on the popular novel, ''Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mystères de Paris" (Chapter 5) and "Narrative Structures in Fleming'' (Chapter 6)both of 1965deal, as does the essay on Superman, with texts which aim at producing univocal effects and which seem not to call for cooperative activity on the part of the reader. However, I realize today, after having developed a general semiotic framework in my book A Theory of Semiotics (1976), that even these essays are dominated by the problem of the role of the reader in interpreting texts. |
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From such a perspective the essay in Peirce and contemporary semantics (Chapter 7), written in 1976, offers many clues for establishing a richer theoretical background for the concept of interpretative cooperation. |
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In "Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text" (Chapter 8), written at the end of 1977 for this book, I try to connect the modalities of textual interpretation with the problem of possible worlds. |
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To make clear (to myself as well as to my readers) the constancy of the theme of interpretative cooperation in the essays collected here, I have written the introductory essay, "The Role of the Reader." Here the textual problems approached in the course of the earlier essays are viewed in connection with the present state of the artwhich is taken fully into account only in "Lector in Fabula." It might be argued that the analyses made between 1959 and 1971 should be rewritten in a more up-to-date jargon. But afterwit is everybody's wit; it is better that the earlier essays remain as witnesses to a constant exploration into textuality made during twenty years of prehistorical attempts. The few |
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