Semiostylistique: L'effet de l'art (review)

This book seeks to present a semiostylistics that is similar to what George Molinié called in his earlier works, notably in Mazaleyrat and Molinié (Vocabulaire de la stylistique, Jean Mazaleyrat and Georges Molinié, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989.), sémiotique de second niveau, i.e. ‘the study concerning the cultural representationalism of the systems of anthropological value, a study which is itself entailed in cultural semiotics’ (5).

The book is divided into six chapters. In the first chapter, M examines the significance of the processes of semiotization, i.e. of languages or ‘stabilized social praxis with symbolic value’ (275), processes that are constructive of social life vis-à-vis society.

The next two chapters deal with verbal art. M studies the ‘litteralité des objects de l’art verbal’ in the light of the stylistics whose aim is to study exclusively and methodologically the structure of the models of emission and reception of the text as discourse.

In the fourth chapter, he first sheds light on the significance of the pole of reception which measures the textual literality; then he determines the function of the verbal within this pole.

The fifth chapter refers to the theory of sexuality enactment and its relationship with the body. This chapter constitutes an interpretation of art reception in the light of verbal analysis.

In the last chapter, M considers art as a kind of mourning, based on the hypothesis that death, as a horizon of the body, is also a horizon of art.

The book has a twofold interest: on the one hand, it presents a theory integrated into art and attached to a global semiotic system of production and reception of exchanges constructed on the model of erotic enactment. On the other hand, M’s work presents, in general cultural semiotics, an attempt to focus on the thought of body.