A Study of Visual Form in Literary Imagery

Abstract

Michael Riffaterre has repeatedly explained that it is in the very nature of poetry to systematically determine itself through the coupling, opposing, and expanding of its linguistic strata, and that it is thanks to this dynamic process of tension that poetry can confer on referential and habitual language a larger span of significance.¹ This larger or deeper layer of significance invites interpretation and, for semioticians, is available for classification or for decoding. Until the advent of post-structural epistemology — where expression is conceived as a storehouse for dominant or subjugating bodies of knowledge rather than merely as a system for representation — it has usually been in the very nature of literary analysis to be inspired by, if not directly predicated on, an Aristotelian method which categorizes recurring verbal resemblances and differences in order to accidentally define a work. This exploratory method achieves its goal by detecting the verbal components that will subsequently provide verbal meaning. In a flexible manner verbal meaning is understood here as a direction towards a referred world, and as a relation between the components that assemble the linguistic strata. Such a relation offers itself as an explanation of the dependence that words and references entertain among themselves.