The reading of literary texts: a semiotic approach

Abstract

Communicative practices involve, in general, the simultaneous action of symbols, indices and icons. The semiosis of a literary text is not different, so it is virtually impossible to isolate a text which is purely symbolic, indexical or iconic. However, it is possible to identify contexts in which one of these modes of representation appears more strongly, and so becomes crucial to reveal the effects which the author wants to emphasize. The aim of this paper is to describe some situations in which the emphasis in each of these three modes determines our perception of specific meanings in poems and narratives. To this end, we use Peirce’s Theory of Signs, specifically his second thrichotomy, which deals with the relations between signs and their objects. These concepts are taken here in their theoretical sense, then they are applied to the specific context of literary texts, while we read some works by renowned authors in Brazilian literature as Manuel Bandeira, João Guimarães Rosa, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto. More than summarizing a classification framework, we aim to demonstrate that understanding the symbolic, indexical and iconic devices in these texts requires different cognitive strategies of the literary phenomenon.