Reading as a Trans-Semiosis: Don Quixote, a very special reader of the world

Abstract

[Abstract] Reading is a cognitive process of constructing a textuality of a text on the basis of a world knowledge. Structural poetics makes an assumption that textuality resides in a text. Cognitive poetics has questioned this assumption by claiming that it is not in a text but in the interaction between a text and a reader that textuality is being constructed. My thesis is that reading as a cognitive process is of a semiotic order. In this paper I put forward a concept of ‘trans-semiosis’ to account for this reading process from a semiotic point of view. Trans-semiosis supposes at least two autonomous semiotic orders that cross each other to produce a new semiotic order. For the illustration of my purpose I attempt to consider Don Quixote as a very special reader of the world. Why is he a special reader? Interestingly the object of his reading activity is not a text but the world itself. My theoretical claim here is that reading the world is a cognitive process of constructing a ‘textuality’ of the world on the basis of a ‘text’ knowledge.