earticle

영어

A fundamental fact of human existence is that we have no access to nature or to another mind, or even to our own mind, except through signs. The study of signs thus becomes an attempt to understand a system presumed to mediate between the human perspective and reality--a system we use to describe as well as to construct. This paper presents an opportunity for discussing, under the headings of salient Saussurean and Peircean ideas and Russian formalism, a number of influential assumptions that semioticians continue to make or modify. There is no doubt that semiotics is very important in relation to the theory of literature, for it offers a kind of broader, more general analysis of a work of literature. This becomes obvious when a comparison is made with other approaches, the theoretical foundations of which were often based on onesided analyses of one of the functions of signs. The study of this polysemic versatality of a single sign increases our capacity to penetrate the semantics of a literary text. This perspective helps us to explore an area of the incorporation of heterogeneous literary texts in the text under study. Particularly stimulating work along these lines has been done by Mukarovsky, Lotman, Barthes, Culler, Kristeva and Michael Riffaterre, etc.