Семиотика

Literary semiotics is not a science with its own object, history or terminology. It is a specific occupation, which appears to be overt, manifestly applied and semiotic (semiotics pursuit in the specified way) on the one hand, and covert, or in other words implicit occupation of literary theory (literary science pursuit in the specified way), on the other. The covertness sterns far in the past - 1928 being a safe start, although it was already predicted a decade earlier - in 1916. The overtness could be traced at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. When the name “literary semiotics” was first pronounced then, it just followed in the train of an already trodden road. The name can be attributed (an effort to) modernity but the occupation adheres to its own principles. Overt things often appear to be applicatory semiotic - semiotics deals, for one reason or another, with literature as a field in which certain semiotic postulates are applied; the text as a aggregate of signs, but also as a complete sign itself; the text as the practice of assigning meaning, as a process (semiosis); the problem of meaning in literature; the problem of the referent and so on and so forth. Covert things belong to literary theory and it has been difficult to understand them beyond a humanitarian debate since the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, in which literature does not stand on its own, although it often changes its partners; actually since the time it tries to be a science, to separate itself from aesthetics, sociology, psychology, philosophy. Covert things suppose profound relations to the study of language, to the shift of focus on literature as discourse. Their history is richer than the history of overt things. It is often insisted, and not accidentally, that semiotics has dual application in the study of literature.