Multiscale textual semiotic analysis

Abstract

There has been a wide range of semiotic analysis regarding literary texts. The present study, as far as literature is concerned, focuses on Umberto Eco's fourth novel Baudolino (2000), taking it as a typical example of multi-volume texts that seem to demand a careful approach. So, through this study, the analyst - in order to distinguish the preferred to the scientific reading - may use the common and rather traditional semiotic tool of isotopies, projecting it into Greimas' Generative Grammar, and on the way meaning is articulated in associative networks. Thus, it is examined whether this algorithmic confrontation leads to a multiscale analysis, with its bi-dimensionality verifying the concept of intertextuality, as conceived by Kristeva (1974, 1980). More specifically, the study methodologically passes through the theoretical concept of isotopies, as presented by various scholars, to carry on with the homogeneity traced with the associative networks. Next, the literary extracts from the original text show whether meaning can be anchored in phases, revealing how typology is related to topology (Lemke 2000).