Textual semiotics

This article presents textual semiotics. It briefly introduces textual semiotics’ roots in Aristotle’s Poetics then, more recently, in the work of structuralist and formalist theorists such as Propp. A key development in the mid-twentieth century, the ‘invention’ of the text by Barthes and Lotman, is discussed, along with comments on the role of narratology and textual semiotics’ democratization of the focus of analysis. The article also discusses some criticisms of textual semiotics, particularly the problem of code. Toward the end, it focuses on an example of Greimassian text analysis which demonstrates textual semiotics’ concern with readership.