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The Semiology of the Theater: Twenty-Three Centuries or Twenty-Two Years?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Tadeusz Kowzan
Tadeusz Kowzan*
Affiliation:
Université de Caen
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As with any historical study, including that of knowledge and ideas, the progress of the semiology of the theater is subject to periodicity. The aim of any division into periods is to obtain a global view, even at the price of simplifications, but it can also bring out the hidden aspects of the phenomena under study.

The semiology or semiotics of the theater, that is, the application of the idea of sign to the art of the spectacle, has a long past, in which several stages may be distinguished, and first of all those that I would call the presemiology and the protosemiology of the theater.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 38 , Issue 149 , March 1990 , pp. 84 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 1462 a 4-7.

2 De doctrina christiana, book II:III, 4, and XXV, 38.

3 Aristotelis "De interpretatione" commentarius, Ch. 1.

4 Marc Angenot has given a semiologic interpretation of the works of Conrart, Bretteville, Bary, Crevier and Dinouart in his article "Les traités de l'éloquence du corps", Semiotica, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1973, pp. 60-82.

5 Quoted from the English edition of John M. Robertson, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, London, G. Routledge, 1905, pp. 522-523.

6 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univer sity Press, 1931, vol. 2, p. 136 (2.230). Peirce evokes here the historical drama by E.G. Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839) which was highly successful in England and the United States.

7 Manuscript 634, dated by Peirce 17 September, 1909. I was able to consult his manuscripts at the Peirce Edition Project of Indianapolis, and I am grateful to the director of this center, Christian J.W. Kloesel.

8 The best presentation in French of the Prague School was published in Poland by Irena Skawińska, "La sémiologie du théâtre in statu nascendi: Prague, 1931-1941", Roczniki Humanistyczne, Vol. 25 No. 1, 1977, pp. 53-76. Italian trans lation in Biblioteca Teatrale, No. 20, 1978, pp. 115-135.

9 As for Spanish publications, recently more and more numerous, a critical and exhaustive bibliography is given by José Romera Castillo, Semiótica literaria y teatral en España, Kassel, Reichenberger, 1988.

10 A.J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, Paris, Hachette, 1979, pp. 392-393.

11 See Tadeusz Kowzan, "Iconisme o mimétisme?" Semiotica, Vol. 71, Nos. 3-4, 1988, pp. 213-226.

12 A definition of the specifically theatrical sign was proposed in my book, Le signe et le théâtre (to appear).

13 R. Posner, "Paradoxes sémiotiques de la parole dans Tristram Shandy de Laur ence Sterne," Le Journal Canadien de Recherche Sémiotique, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2, 1980-1981, p. 33.