Literary Semiotics

Literature is mainly “language art”, although theatre and film apply other media beyond language (mimics, gestures, action on stage or in the film, music). Even printed literature has musical characteristics (in poetry); imagined actions, types of spatial organization, battle and motion patterns in the novel (cf. crime novels or fantasy novels) imply aspects of visual semiotics and dynamic semiotics. As fiction establishes an imagined world, it concerns the mental abilities of imagination and memory and is therefore linked to cognitive semiotics. In science fiction, future evolutions of mankind and the world are imagined, such that evolutionary semiotics and cosmological semiotics become relevant for the understanding of literature (and film).

Many writers are also painters /drawers or musicians, such that the combination of literary practice and visual art or music are a special concern for literary semiotics (cf. the analysis of writing/painting by Hermann Hesse in Wildgen 2002, the relation between Zola’s novel and Manet’s painting of “Nana” in Wildgen, 1997).

On the stage and in action films, forces and force effects are a central concern, which asks for the application of dynamic semiotics (cf. Wildgen 2010b on action sequences and major force fields in the series of “James Bond” films, mainly in: Quantum of Solace). In the case of a written novel or script underlying the film (or theatre) the contrast between visual and written media and their adequate means of meaning construction and narration can be compared.