Making sense of experience: on the semiotic nature of culture and literature

Abstract In 1934, Jan Mukařovský stated that ‘art is a semiotic fact’. This statement raised two issues that haven’t as yet been satisfactorily dealt with. The first concerns the nature of the sign : what, and when is a sign? The second relates to the consequences, for the humanities, of the semiotic nature of its object. While the focus is on literature, this paper aims at tackling both issues, thus contributing to a scientific semiotics of culture and literature. Three aspects of the semiotic are deemed to be of particular importance if we want to understand literary semiosis within the broader context of culture: the dialectical nature of the semiotic process, its four basic strategies, and its recursivity. Together, these three aspects constitute the building blocks of culture and, with that, its logic . The four strategies, that cumulatively build upon each other, are: perception of similarities, imagination of artefacts, conceptualizing, and the analysis of structures. On the basis of the theoretical analysis, literary semiosis is then characterized as reflexive semiosis , at the intersection between the artefactual and the conceptual , that is, as imaginative reflection on experience, through language . The paper concludes with a short reflection on semiotics and hermeneutics in the humanities.