The term ‘motif’ is consistently used in musicology and literary criticism, yet it seemingly refers to in many ways very different phenomena. While motif in music usually means a formal, syntactic unit of expression within the structure of an individual piece, literary motifs are mostly understood as units of semantic content, often also connecting a corpus of individual texts. In spite of this, the dialectic relations between the old and the new or the known and the unknown is arguably a constitutive element of both musical and literary motifs, since all individual statements of a certain motif are perceived as both identical with the already known type and as somewhat different from it. This dialectic relation, has deep foundations in human semiotic cognition, for iconicity, is arguably also based on such a dialectic interpretation of the qualities of certain objects of perception – similarity can also be understood as a dialectic complex of identity and difference, relying on human mimetic memory. These essential dialectics then arguably play a crucial role in connecting familiarity and unfamiliarity through the use of motifs, as well as in the mutual projections of form and content upon each other, which eventually makes artistic modelling possible.
The paper argues that in an era of multimodal and -medial convergence culture, abounding in innovative strategies for representing literature in a wide range of textual forms and combinatorial patterns, there is an intensified need to rethink the theoretical and analytical competence in literary semiotics to better understand its cultural interpretations. The new cultural ontology requires a reconceptualisation of the disciplinary status of literary semiotics within semiotic-theoretical frameworks. Among the criteria of the elaboration of this issue, the concept of semiotic literariness is defined, bridging intratextual and intercultural literary semiotics. For the understanding of semiotic literariness, intersemiotic transposition and projection are put centre stage for the interpretation of the functionality of any literary feature present in a source text or in its transposed variants. The question of the analysability of intersemiotic transposition calls for relating literary semiotics first of all to (trans)media studies, transmedia narratology and literary comparatistics, and also to cultural semiotics. The research attempts to ground the disciplinary identification on presenting possible methodologies for grasping semiotic literariness. The illustrative case study analyses semiotic literariness in Titian’s picture Madonna with Saints and members of the Pesaro family (1528).
Literature was the first field of semiotic exercise and investigation in France: with the contributions of Barthes, Greimas and Rastier, textual analysis was born. On this textual basis, literary semiotics encounters several major issues, leading future development projects. The first issue is that of the specific conditions for artistic productions, the creative tension between the singularity of each work and its power of generality, all grasped with a methodological organon itself of general scope. The second issue is phenomenological: literature proposes textual reconfigurations of sensory experience, imprinted in figurative manifestations. Figurativeness simultaneously directs us towards the semantics of language, towards the sensory world in which we live and towards the corporeal instance – flesh and subjectivity – which joins them. The third issue, broadening the textual analysis to anthropological considerations, concerns the study of practices that structure the surface narrativity in literary texts, the relations between humans and non-humans, living and non-living beings that populate the texts, and the ‘collective actants’ that are constituted in the textual dynamics of composition and recomposition of figurative networks. Finally, this anthropological issue leads to forms of living and major anthropic regimes that configure literary worlds.
Abstract Drawing on Roland Barthes’s mythology theory centering on the second-order semiological system, naturalization and depoliticization, this paper analyzes René Etiemble’s 1930s critiques of Western colonial discourse about China. Etiemble argues Western texts construct a backward, irrational “Oriental Other” across economic, political and cultural spheres: they deny China’s industrial capacity for imperial gains, disguise the Kuomintang’s fascist New Life Movement as Christian salvation, and whitewash the opium trade to justify colonial civilizing missions. These narratives erase exploitative historical realities, depoliticize unequal power relations, and falsely naturalize Western civilizational superiority. Etiemble demystifies colonial myths through economic data evidence, cross-cultural fascist comparisons, juxtaposed contradictory texts, and real-world anti-colonial activism. He establishes two anti-Eurocentric counter-narratives: the “red sacred site” of Chinese Soviet areas and China’s vibrant cultural heritage. However, this study uncovers a semiotic paradox: these progressive symbolic images may be simplified, romanticized or depoliticized in cross-cultural circulation, easily transformed into new static myths. This research validates Barthes’s semiotic framework for postcolonial analysis of Western China narratives and highlights that myth critique must be anchored in specific historical contexts to avoid such discursive limitations.
