From Literary Illusions to Media Simulacra: Toward a Semiotic Imagology in the Era of Global Communication

In the pre-globalization era, when communication between nations was difficult and infrequent, and direct (experiential) or indirect (textual-descriptive) knowledge was scant, images of ‘foreign countries’ were frequently constructions based on inadequate information. As a result, fictional descriptions and images were the primary source for people to gain some knowledge of other nations. However, beginning with the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we began to step into an age of globalization, which generated the diversification of ‘source texts’ in this regard. Today, the emergence of new media has accelerated and proliferated such diversity. These new media texts now play a dominant role in forming the image of other countries, to some degree replacing traditional fictional texts. The basic presuppositions of comparative literature imagology have changed accordingly. Starting from the core concept of ‘images’, this paper discusses why it is necessary to integrate imagology, with ‘semiotic images’ as core concept, and ‘communications research’.