69249454-chandler-semiotics

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CHALLENGING
THE LITERAL
Semiotics represents a challenge to the ‘literal’ because it rejects the
possibility that we can neutrally represent ‘the way things are’. In this
chapter we will explore the ways in which semioticians have problematized
two key distinctions: that at the level of the signifier between
the literal and the figurative and that at the level of the signified
between denotation and connotation.
RHETORICAL TROPES
A sea-change in academic discourse, which has been visible in many
disciplines, has been dubbed ‘the rhetorical turn’ or ‘the discursive
turn’. The central proposition of this contemporary trend is that
rhetorical forms are deeply and unavoidably involved in the shaping
of realities. Form and content are inseparable. Language is not a
neutral medium and our choice of words matters. The North
American literary theorist Stanley Fish insists that ‘it is impossible
to mean the same thing in two (or more) different ways’ (Fish 1980,