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Toward a semiotic reading of poetry: A Chinese example

'Semiotics can be informally defined as a science that studies all possible varieties of signs, the rules governing their generation and production, transmission and exchange, reception and interpretation. Concisely put, semiotics has two complementary, interdependent aspects: communication and signification' (Sebeok 1978: viii). The impact of semiotics on contemporary scholarship is significant. Many disciplines in social sciences and humanities have been, in one way or another, semiotically reoriented in certain recent scholarly studies, as shown in the Approaches to Semiotics series, the Advances in Semiotics series, the international journal Semiotica, and some other publications. The application of the semiotic discipline to the study of poetry grows rapidly and many useful concepts have been put forth by such semiotics-oriented critics as Morris, Jakobson, Lotman, Barthes, Kristeva, Eco, and Riffaterre. A semiotic poetics, being a derivative of general semiotics, can also be viewed as a science in the sense that it aims at describing the general laws and features governing the signification of poetic texts. To be sure, the poetic text reveals itself as a particular spatiotemporal cultural occurrence, governed by linguistic, poetic, and other cultural conventions. In spite of this historicality of the poetic text, semiotic poetics can still claim general validity, if it makes certain adaptations when it applies general laws and features to a particular text. In semiotic poetics, perhaps more than in other types of poetic theory, language needs to be concretely and comprehensively understood in its dynamic relation to signification, foregrounded as the materiality of the poetic text, on the basis of which varied dimensions of the text are profiled and analyzed. Using this semiotic orientation, I would like to pursue a few things, but pursue them in the form of reading rather than in the form of poetics. I suggest in this paper that a semiotic reading of poetry includes two levels: the significative level and the iconic level. The iconic reading, whose rationale is in line with the fact that iconicity has found its configuration in almost every aspect of reality, as shown in Sebeok's research (1977: