The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

212 Scansion
use a variety of devices: caricature,
exaggeration, parallelism or parody, to
achieve similar ends.
See R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire:
Magic, Ritual, Art (1960); R. Paulson (ed.),
Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism
(1971); C. Rawson (ed.), English Satire
and the Satiric Tradition (1984).
BCL
Scansion See METRE.
Scheme Redefined by classical
rhetoricians and grammarians until its
meaning became indeterminate, ‘scheme’
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was enormously popular in the vocabulary
of literary and rhetorical theorists
who, exploiting their new methods,
managed to repeat the process. Any reasonably
accurate reading of the versatile
definitions and usages of the term in such
works as Richard Sherry’s Treatise of
Schemes and Tropes (1550), Henry
Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577)
or John Prideaux’s Sacred Eloquence
(1659) will arm the critic with sufficient
authority to explain and defend as
‘schemes’ all known figures and tropes in
English and Mandarin Chinese, the
‘conceits’ of seventeenth-century poetry,
the rhetorical strategies of Robespierre,
and the designs, foils, plots and prosody
of Vladimir Nabokov. Or, conversely
‘scheme’ has been dealt with as a special
kind of FIGURE: an ‘easy’ one, a ‘figure
of sound’ or, more simply, as a hazy
synonym for ‘trope’. To support such
interpretations of Renaissance thought
and practice requires the suppression of
a considerable amount of evidence, not
only because of the extreme scope of the
viewpoint in the original texts, but also
because ‘figure’, in Renaissance terms, is
habitually referred to as a subordinate
component of ‘scheme’. Cf. FIGURE.
TGW
Scriptible See PLEASURE.
Semiotics Deals with the study of
signs: their production and communication,
their systematic grouping in languages
or codes, their social function. It is
doubly relevant to the study of literature,
for literature uses language, the primary
sign system in human culture, and is further
organized through various subsidiary
codes, such as generic conventions.
Semiotics has an odd history. Various
Western thinkers – the Stoics and Saint
Augustine, Locke and Husserl – have
treated signs and sign-functions, without
quite constituting a separate study. Other
disciplines can be seen, retrospectively, as
crypto-semiotic; thus Tzvetan Todorov
has discussed rhetoric from a semiotic
point of view (Theories of the Symbol,
1977, trans. 1982). It is probable that any
study as ambitiously inclusive as semiotics
will always be plagued by problems
of cohesion and demarcation. These problems
are reflected in the double founding
of modern semiotics from within different
disciplines, by the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and
by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857–1915).
Saussure’s reorientation of linguistics
from a diachronic to a synchronic
approach, from the study of historical
change to the systemization of a given
state of language, conditions his treatment
of the sign. ‘Language is a system of
signs that express ideas’, and the interrelationship
of signs thus determines meaning.
The expressive function of the sign is
achieved through its components of
signifier (as image or form) and signified
(as concept or idea); their linkage, with
minor exceptions, is seen as arbitrary and
unmotivated. Similarly, the system of
signs that comprises a language expresses
no given or predetermined meanings;