Every theory has its pet names. What does Semiotics think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
For a semiotician, literature is a system of signs that’s expressed through writing. It’s not a question of whether a work is “literary”—sure, “Roses are red, violets are blue” sounds nice, and analyzing texts from a semiotic angle helps classify different usages of language, but this isn’t about judging whether a work is worthy of being called “literature.”
Keep in mind also that semioticians don’t always share exactly the same approach: from a Saussurian perspective, literature is a structure made up of chains of signifiers. However, for a social semiotician, literature also reflects the context (i.e. time period, culture, etc.) in which it’s produced.
What is an author?
First off, the author doesn’t have to be some sort of genius. In fact, with its emphasis on a text’s structure, semiotics debunks this concept. Picking a text apart makes us more aware of how the text is constructed, and this brings the concept of authorship down to earth.
In practical terms, then, the author is a person who has encoded a text, but that’s not to say that the author always takes the same approach: some authors may try to limit their work to a narrow reading while others give the reader more leeway. The move towards social semiotics has also impacted on the concept of authorship, as it focuses on the author as an individual writing within a particular time and place—again, taking us away from the idea of the author as a mythical figure and giving weight to the all-powerful sign.
What is a reader?
The reader is a sign-user who decodes any given text. However, decoding can mean different things: where a text uses a dominant code, we might ask whether the reader goes along with this code or questions or challenges it.
The extent to which we’re able to read against the grain is partly based on the extent to which a text is “open” or “closed,” but even where a text appears to have a set meaning, this doesn’t guarantee that the reader is going to be a passive receiver—that would be too easy for a Shmoop-tastic decoder like us, right?
Social semiotics has also highlighted the importance of the cultural and historical context in which readers are positioned. This means that the reader isn’t just someone whose job is to figure out the meaning of the text; instead, we bring our own experiences into the mix.