Semioethics and Literary Writing:Between Peirce and Bakhtin

• 作者: Susan Petrilli
• 来源期刊: 语言与符号学研究
• 学科: 文学
• 关键词: answerability/responsiveness COGNITION CREATIVITY INTERTEXTUALITY listening
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（1）
• 页码范围: 13-30
• 页数: 18页
• 分类号: H

摘要

In the early phase of its development,semiotics was understood as“semeiotics”and studied symptoms.Today we propose to recover this ancient dimension of semiotics focussed on health,care and the quality of life,and reorganise it in semioethical terms.In fact,as interference increases in communication between the historico-social sphere and the biological,between culture and nature,between the semiosphere and the biosphere,the need for a“semioethical turn”in the study of signs with an understanding of the relation of signs to values has become ever more urgent.Literary writing is particularly interesting from this perspective thanks to its extraordinary capacity to stage values that animate life to the best in terms of the properly human.These values are characterized by high degrees of opening to the other,by responsiveness/answerability toward the other,by a propensity for listening to the other,for giving time to the other.Construed on relations of distancing and at once of affinity among signs,metaphor—or more broadly imagery,figurative language—is emblematic of literary writing,though not limited to it.As amply demonstrated by Victoria Welby,far from serving as a mere decorative supplement,the figurative dimension of expression is structural to signifying processes,to the acquisition itself of knowledge and understanding.Welby’s work may be read as prefiguring recent trends in language studies as represented by cognitive linguistics today.Mikhail Bakhtin has also made an important contribution in this sense.He has developed the study of signs in terms of moral philosophy and,in fact,his approach to semiotics is easily oriented in the sense of semioethics.In such a framework he evidences the close relationship between sign studies and literary writing.For a full understanding of the sense of Bakhtin’s approach to studies on verbal language,it is important to highlight his insistence on the inexorable interconnection—which he describes as direct and dialectical—between literary language and l