Wordly Wise: The Semiotics of Discourse in Dante’s “Commedia (Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics)
Author: Raffaele de Benedictis
Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Edition: New edition
Publication Date: 2011-12-28
Language: English
Paperback: 257 pages
ISBN-10: 1433116227
ISBN-13: 9781433116223
Book Description
In Wordly Wise: The Semiotics of Discourse in Dante’s Commedia, Raffaele De Benedictis proposes a new critical method in the study of the Divine Comedy and Dante’s minor works. It systematically and comprehensively addresses the discursive aspect of Dante’s works and focuses mainly on the reader, who, along with the author and the text, contributes to the making of discursive paths and discourse-generating functions through the act of reading. This work allows the reader to become acquainted with how meaning is generated and whether it is granted legitimacy in the text. Also, in a system of signification, sign function and sign production are not limited to the properties of the mind but are the result of working interactively with the properties of discourse, which provide directionality for the reader’s enunciation(s) in action.
Review
«Perhaps more rigorously than many previous studies, Raffaele De Benedictis’ book succeeds in capturing the novelty of Dante’s discourse. Basing himself on seminal theories of allegory as a discourse that overlaps with hermeneutics and calls into question the role of the reader, De Benedictis, in this splendid work that combines scholarship and a sense of complexity of literary texts, has written an excellent, exciting study of medieval semiotics.» (Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University)
«Raffaele De Benedictis chooses to interpret and understand Dante’s work by submitting it to the filter of the semiotics of discourse. Heuristic and hermeneutic effects of the contemporary semiotic approach appear here so fully. It is not the semiotics of discourse that imposes rules and structures on Dante’s work, but the reverse occurs: artwork appears in all its innovative strength and in the creative power with which it imposes its law on the analysis grid. This is a great analysis, where the reader, installed at the heart of the work, witnesses the implementation of all cognitive and emotive requests addressed to him/her.» (Jacques Fontanille, University of Limoges, Institut Universitaire de France)
About the Author
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