Talk:Semiotic literary criticism

Semiotic interpretation does not consist of the traditional methods described here (looking for symbolism, metaphor, and allegory). In fact, one key tenet of semiotics is that signs do not have meaning in a vacuum -- they acquire their meaning from membership in structures of signs. Thus, for instance, a semiotician will look for binary oppositions in the text -- pairs of signs which are placed in opposition to one another: in a story, for instance, one might find images of "fire" counterposed to "water" images, and a contrast drawn between the male and female characters. Often a number of oppositions will be aligned with one another in the text, so that, say, men are identified with fire (in the story, a man's face is described as "fiery") and women with water (a woman who has been crying has "watery eyes"). Notice that these instances of fire/water and men/women are paired with contrasting emotions as well: anger versus sadness. A structure of binary oppositions in the story looks like this, then:

    man/woman
    anger/sadness
    fire/water

This structure seems to imply that anger is a masculine emotion, and that sadness is feminine, and that the difference between masculine and feminine emotional responses is as natural as the difference between fire and water. In other words, a layer of meaning (a "subtext" underlying the text's surface -- in this case, a subtext about gender relations) is implicit in the way the story makes structures out of groups of signs, not just the presence of individual "symbols" with conventionally-preassigned meanings.

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