Scheda Articolo

Writing Literature. An Anthroposemiotic Approach: Modeling for Knowing

in Versus n. 125, Appearance Screens. Technologies, Imagination, Forms of Life between Semiotics and Aesthetics, pp.323-342

Abstract (italiano)

The departure point of the current discussion is cultural, referring to writing as a natural semiotic activity. Natural implications here involve cognitive, emotional and evolutional vocabulary. Anthroposemiotic terminology thus seems the expedient means to describe the subject matter. To do that, I’ll approach it through three macro questions: how do literary writers actually write? What do they really do? Why? Answering these three interlinked questions, I argue that in order to write literature, writers have to observe closely both the immediate environment and the global universes, to be able to model them culturally in forms of learning, i.e., knowing for natural purposes. Put otherwise, as naturally anthropsemiotic agents, literary writers involve their individualities and sociality to observe their environments and remodel the world by changing the laws to produce knowing for natural needs. The primary task of the anthroposemiotic approach to literary writing is therefore to describe the way writers know the world rather than to know what they know about the world.