The Reader and the Reality of the Literary Text: Towards the Construction of Aesthetic Meaning

Abstract

The deeper and more exhaustive knowledge of the literary work, which arose mostly from the formalist studies carried out in the twentieth century, has created its own theoretical framework, and this framework — leaving aside any critical approach it — necessarily goes through its integration in the general semiotic space in the way it was initially conceived by C. Morris.¹ For his definition of the above-mentioned space, Morris considers three types of relationships which are established in the communicative framework between the sign, the participants,the referent and the context. Thus, he talks about syntax where relationships are established between signs and within signs, about semantics where there are relationships between a sign and the referent expressed by it, and about pragmatics where the relationships are drawn between participants — the producer and the recipient — signs, and the communicative context.