Harri Veivo

Christina Ljungberg

Jørgen Dines Johansen

This volume marks a shift. For it reveals how literary semiotics at present has moved toward methodological pluralism. The sharp lines of division, especially between the two most dominant approaches, those of C.S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, have dissolved and a manifest synergy has emerged from the deepening appreciating that the focal concern of literary scholarship is irreducibly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity necessitates a variety of approaches. The significance of literary texts is neither entirely identifiable with authorial intention nor susceptible to empirical verification. Even so, the possibility of shared meaning and mutual understanding, whether or not acknowledged, animates the work of literary scholars. Approaches and theories in which communication and representation are explained, rather than explained away, deserve a fuller hearing than they have received in the recent past. The contributors to this volume highlight the communicative functions of literary texts and, more controversially, the representational possibilities secured by literary production.

Redefining Literary Semiotics

Olga Fischer

Elżbieta Tabakowska

Sara Lenninger

This volume investigates iconicity as to both comprehension and production of meaning in language, gesture, pictures, art and literature. It highlights iconic processes in meaning-making and interpretation across different semiotic systems at structurally, historically and pragmatically different levels of iconicity, with special focus on Cognitive Semiotics. Exploring the ubiquity of iconicity in verbal, visual and gestural communication, these contributions discuss it from the point of view of human meaning-making, examined as a phenomenon that is experienced, embodied and often polysemiotic in nature.

Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems

Lars Elleström

The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language, others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity  the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades, the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor studies, poetry, intermediality, and multimodality.

Iconic Investigations

The Creative Craft of Margaret Atwood's Fiction

To Join, to Fit, and to Make

El?zbieta Tabakowska

Insistent Images presents a number of new departures dealing with iconicity on the conceptual and the structural levels. On the level of structure, the interface between different aspects of iconicity, lexical meaning and grammar is discussed in reference to both spoken and signed languages. Novel approaches to aural iconicity investigate a wide range of phenomena from phonological iconicity to the role of iconic features in discourse, in the nineteenth century practice of reading aloud, in the almost magic incantations of fin de siècle poetry and in Tolkien's invented languages. Several papers examine the function of iconicity in visual and avant-garde poetry, where iconic features allow a reduction of means, which, paradoxically, generates textual diversification and complexity. A discussion of iconic text strategies shows how texts are comprehended through iconic holistic transfer from complex natural and action patterns. 'Liberature', which integrates text, image and physical space, is another novel area of study, as are the investigations into the iconic properties of film and of multimedia performance. Film is intrinsically iconic, while at the same time being, like photography, indexical; in multimedia performance, on the other hand, iconicity functions intermedially by both integrating and reflecting processes of perception and conceptualization. These last two new fields of inquiry further enhance this truly interdisciplinary volume's explorations of icons as 'insistent images'.

Insistent Images

How do readers make sense of a picture, a photograph, or a map in literary narratives in which visual signs play a critical role? How do authors accomplish their various objectives in constructing such complex texts? What strategies and techniques do they use to project fictional worlds and to provide their readers with the means for orienting themselves there? This book investigates the dynamics of the imaginary diagrams created by cartographers, photographers, and writers of narratives, giving ample evidence of how mapping practices have inspired the imagination of a vast number of authors from Thomas More up to contemporary writers. A special focus is on the effects created by the projection of photographs into the narrative space, and how our seemingly effortless interpretation of photographs and even maps masks complex cognitive processes. The theoretical horizon of this study encompasses the fields of cartography, mental maps, iconicity research, and the spatial turn in cultural studies.

Christina Ljungberg

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