Semiotic Encounters: Text, Image, and Trans-Nation. ed. by Sarah Säckel, Walter Göbel and Noha Hamdy (review)

As leading contributor Mary Orr’s plenary essay suggests, Semiotic Encounters is an intrepid reassessment of literary concepts, “interdisciplinarity, intermediarity, [and] interdiscursivity” (15). Mainly made up of articles on early modern to contemporary anglophone fiction, the book examines texts primarily as historico-cultural documents that result from transmigration of a source text into another milieu. Within these parameters, the book devotes itself to transnational as well as postcolonial case studies. In addition, the book introduces new modalities of textual deterritorialization in visual media such as film and theater, especially within the context of global reception and consumption. Semiotic Encounters, therefore, bridges conventionally separate areas of disciplines, providing formalistic studies of literary texts and of extratextual conditions significant to production. Despite the wide range of case studies, what sustains each contribution is a general consensus that no texts are born tabula rasa but are in fact offspring of preexisting sources. More holistically speaking, the book accounts for synchronic and diachronic modes of reception and reinterpretation understanding the text as a repository of not only meaning but also of deferral due to its fluid nature.

Critical investigation of intertextuality itself is no longer a novelty today, having its roots into modern structuralism, especially French structuralism, of the 1960s. Notably, Gérald Genette’s intertexts originated as a subcategory of transtexts that awakened an interest in the anatomy of literary texts. More explicitly, Roland Barthes argued for the anteriority embedded in all literary texts, which makes no writing original. Consequently, the author is merely a coordinator of other sources. In addition, Julia Kristeva’s more poststructural diagram of two codes, constitutive of the author-reader axis and the texts-other texts axis, has served a seminal index for our understanding of intertexts. Postcolonial studies, for example, tend to draw on these theoretical models in order to articulate texts as a living record of mobilized language and literary convention with respect to different geopolitical realms. Since 1980s, the phenomena of literary transmigration have been labeled by paradigmatic categories such as the postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and transnational/cultural. On the other hand, as Harish Trivedi argues in his essay in Semiotic Encounters, major concepts such as Homi Bhabha’s “cultural translation,” have been discursively employed without a clear political ground in cases in which the practice of translation imposed itself on the side of the culturally less privileged group (34–35). What Semiotic Encounters revives, however, is the idea of a more holistic nature inherent to the text itself, an idea that challenges the compartmentalization of textual meaning within geopolitical realities. In this way, the book is not necessarily a new direction in semiotics but rather a faithful reapplication of the theory to contemporary studies in comparative literature.

Semiotic Encounters is divided into three parts: “Theorizing Texual and Visual Encounters,” “Textual Encounters,” and “Visual Encounters.” Within each part, the contributions examine the semantics of an original (or index) text, the historico-cultural sources of textual permutation, and the theoretical underpinnings that explain the linkage between the two. Based on the overarching idea that no text is born ex nihilo, the book reconsiders the text as a site where heterogeneous extratextual factors—not limited to geopolitical realities—such as local legends, cultural identity, and readership infinitely mobilize meaning. For example, Nicola Glaubitz employs Ludwig Jäger’s theory of “transcription,” which incorporates the reader’s cognition into the construct of textual meaning. By virtue of repetition and difference, cognition actualizes cultural references into a verbally formulated and transmittable form while making it possible for such an index to grow into an infinitely modifiable form. Similarly, Noma Hardy draws on Julia Kristeva’s transposition theory, contending that intertexuality subscribes to the multitude of signification rooted in the nonidentical rapport between an enunciation and its denotation. Even the momentum of a single image conceives infinitely polysemic implications, as exemplified by the spectacle of...