<i>Semiotic literariness</i> seen in the dense forest of disciplines

Abstract The paper argues that in an era of multimodal and -medial convergence culture, abounding in innovative strategies for representing literature in a wide range of textual forms and combinatorial patterns, there is an intensified need to rethink the theoretical and analytical competence in literary semiotics to better understand its cultural interpretations. The new cultural ontology requires a reconceptualisation of the disciplinary status of literary semiotics within semiotic-theoretical frameworks. Among the criteria of the elaboration of this issue, the concept of semiotic literariness is defined, bridging intratextual and intercultural literary semiotics. For the understanding of semiotic literariness, intersemiotic transposition and projection are put centre stage for the interpretation of the functionality of any literary feature present in a source text or in its transposed variants. The question of the analysability of intersemiotic transposition calls for relating literary semiotics first of all to (trans)media studies, transmedia narratology and literary comparatistics, and also to cultural semiotics. The research attempts to ground the disciplinary identification on presenting possible methodologies for grasping semiotic literariness. The illustrative case study analyses semiotic literariness in Titian’s picture Madonna with Saints and members of the Pesaro family (1528).