Theatrical interpretation of a literary work from the standpoint of semiotic creativity

Abstract

The study presents the results of linguosemiotic analysis of sign correlations between the play “The Elder Son” by Vampilov and 22 theatrical performances based on it (The Interna­tional on-line Festival “The Elder Son — 55”, November, 2020). The play and its multimodal interpretations are viewed as parts of a unique communicative space. These parts may be specified as the original communicative situation and the ‘derivatives’ characterized by semi­otic creativity of their authors — the playwright and the directors. The concept of semiotic resonance is used as a tool that can help to deepen the analysis of the meaning construction in the heterogeneous discourse of drama. Semiotic resonance is understood as the correlations of recurrently used signs accompanied by the amplification of meaning and emergence of new semantic projections. The investigation of the play — theatrical performance transformations made it possible to identify the specific levels of semiotic creativity, which correspond to the degree of pragmatic identity of the original content and its modulations. The author singled out the level of pragmatic equivalence and the level of pragmatic modulation, which account for different pragmatic effects produced and illustrated the realization of the poetic function of a sign in a multimodal discourse.

Keywords

• the poetics of heterogeneous discursive space
• semiotic creativity
• semiotic resonance
• pragma-dialogue