Semiotics and Interpretation by Robert Scholes (review)

104ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW The study is flawed by a disturbing repetitiousness, by some equivocation or semantic legerdemain (for example in the meaning of the phrase "confidence man" and use of the phrase "unwitting confidence man" applied to Egbert and Mark Winsome, along with such confusions as this statement: "This does not mean that [Melville's confidence man] was modeled on [Milton's Satan]" in a chapter entitled "Literary Models"), and by some tenuous arguments (for example that Melville adapted the confidence man's masquerades according to St. Paul's list of spiritual gifts in I Corinthians 12 — with "inconsistencies" being dismissed as evidence of Melville's "flexible" imagination). The book's appearance is enhanced by seven reproductions of George Caleb Bingham's drawings of frontier types. D. G. KEHL Arizona State University Robert Scholes. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 161p. The amount and quality of studies in literary theory appearing with American university press imprints recently is truly impressive. New books by Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, Fredric Jameson; translations of Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov; an important collection by J. Harari — all are significant contributions toward enhancing the (often anemic) theoretical awareness of literary scholars in the U. S. Among such writers, Robert Scholes has been an important figure for his very fine sytheses of critical positions. His own Structuralism andthe Novel (1977), which he very modestly does not include in his valuable annotated bibliographic guide, served as a key work in stimulating narratological discussion in this country. Semiotics and Interpretation will do the same for the larger field of semiology, and Scholes rightly ranges beyond fiction (the privileged genre of structuralism and semiology) to include poetry (except by Michael Riffaterre, often downplayed because it was the privileged genre of New Criticism), to drama (which seems only to attract the attention of theater scholars like Kier Elam or Timothy Hornby) and paraliterary materials like bumper stickers and cultural nonverbal discourse ("The Female Body as Text"; Ch. 8). Eight chapters are sample — and exemplary — analyses of texts in order to demonstrate the efficacy of a semiotically based criticism. Although it does not pretend to be a theoretical statement — indeed, if it were it would be hampered by the over-generous use of Jakobson's schema of the act of communication and the loaded term "interpretation" which seems disconsonant with semiotics unless it is taken as a full synonym of "metaliterary discourse" — Scholes's essays constitute fine contemporary criticism. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University Hanna Spencer. Heinrich Heine. Boston: Twayne, 1982. 173p. The legacy of Heinrich Heine has been well served by Anglo-Saxon scholars. Removed from the sometimes personally perceived ideological controversy which ...