In Literary Discourse: A Semiotic Pragmatic Approach To Literature?

The central discussion of the current paper proceeds as a counter-argumentation to Johansen’s discursal view of literature in Literary Discourse: A Semiotic Pragmatic Approach to Literature (2002).Our premise is that literary discourseis a multiplicity functioning nonlinearly different from one context of interpretation to another. Literature can be therefore appraised as an autonomous composite of discourses not reducible to the idea of mimetic representation of a realitybydisengaging itself from any suppositious monism or any formality built for. In line with such a postulation, we duly present four main perspectives to counter granularity, mimeticity, and linearity, and institutionalization of literature as advocated by Johansen. Drawing

The discussion on the metadiscursivity of literature features it with interdiscursivity and intertextuality. The paper concludes far from analogizing the actual world, the virtual metadiscourse of literature runs parallel to the real world in an attempt to otherwise it.

Keywords: mimeticity, virtual, metadiscourse, literature, Johansen

1-Introduction

Officially, discourse analysis realized as a new systematic contextualized discipline in language studies in 1970s (Van Dijk5-7).Thenceforth, languagescholars studied the relations between textual and contextual components of discoursewithin more developed conjoining perspectives,namely psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, semiolinguistics, pragmalinguistics. Howbeit, contributions to literary discourse analysishavebeen so far both insubstantial and slippery. Leafing through books and articles by discourse analysts like Hassan and Halliday, Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Theo van Leeowen, Teun A. Van Dijk,etc., proves how literature suffers marginalization in the field. Even when Malcolm Coulthard (1985) devotes a chapter to literature– significantly enough, the last chapter of his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis – he carries out a detailed analysis of the stylistic features of a literary text stringently within a linguistic fabric.