Abstrakt
DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.04
The paper explores the semiotic aspects of reading literature, focusing on the literary text as a unique artefact, differing from other verbal texts, the paradox of the literature’s (non)transparency, and the role of sensual perception in its signification/interpretation. It questions how readers engage with literary texts and defines this engagement semiotically. The paper proposes the semiotic classification of reading/interpretation and exemplifies this classification by examining Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and its interpretations. This non-axiological classification originates from a dialogue with the representatives of the Peircean semiotic-pragmatic approach to literature, Harri Veivo and Jørgen Dines Johansen. It revises and modifies their concepts within the logic of Charles S. Peirce’s sign concept and advances understanding of literary reading by integrating the question of textual materiality with Peircean semiotics, offering a nuanced framework to classify and interpret reading strategies. It treats reading as a sign-action, initiated by the reader who chooses the (conventional, contiguity-based, or analogy/resemblance-based) mode of interpretant to connect a representamen (addresser-text) with the dynamic object (semantic whole) and explores how these modes are manifested in reading. It seeks to uncover the differences in the modes and strategies of reading and the reasons/conditions for choosing one or another mode. Lolita is presented as a paradigmatic example of a non-transparent literary text that foregrounds its materiality and invites the reader to activate the sight. The paper analyses how Lolita’s textual structure prompts visual engagement and how the sight’s activation or its lack thereof influences the choice of iconic, indexical, or symbolic mode of reading/interpretation.
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