In the Shadow of Sleeping Maidens. Semiotic Tools for Literary Analysis

Abstract

In how many and in what ways can one construct the textual corpus to be analysed? After a wide range of solutions, from which it is clear that the construction of the corpus depends on a description project and not on something given in advance, the author moves on to two literary examples. The first consists of three descriptions of sleeping Albertine from Marcel Proust's The captive. The analysis shows how these descriptions form a serial syntagma (according to Jacques Geninasca's terminology), i.e. an A B A structure in which the meaning finds, in the last description, a complex composition of values. The second example is taken from Yasunari Kawabata's The House of the Sleeping Beauties, in which the motif of the sleeping girl is taken up on a completely different value background. The article is therefore intended to make us reflect first on very broad methodological issues and, in its second part, to focus on more specific tools for the analysis of the literary text.