French literary semiotics: method, project and ambitions

Abstract Literature was the first field of semiotic exercise and investigation in France: with the contributions of Barthes, Greimas and Rastier, textual analysis was born. On this textual basis, literary semiotics encounters several major issues, leading future development projects. The first issue is that of the specific conditions for artistic productions, the creative tension between the singularity of each work and its power of generality , all grasped with a methodological organon itself of general scope. The second issue is phenomenological : literature proposes textual reconfigurations of sensory experience, imprinted in figurative manifestations. Figurativeness simultaneously directs us towards the semantics of language, towards the sensory world in which we live and towards the corporeal instance – flesh and subjectivity – which joins them. The third issue , broadening the textual analysis to anthropological considerations, concerns the study of practices that structure the surface narrativity in literary texts, the relations between humans and non-humans, living and non-living beings that populate the texts, and the ‘collective actants’ that are constituted in the textual dynamics of composition and recomposition of figurative networks. Finally, this anthropological issue leads to forms of living and major anthropic regimes that configure literary worlds.