On some aspects of the binary in the context of the ternary and the plural in Juri Lotman’s semiotics of literature

Abstract

The paper raises the problem of binarisms in Juri Lotman’s conceptual and text analytical system from a new perspective. The approach combines several focal aspects of examination. It consist of the parallel study of the application of the notion of binarism in cultural semiotic theory and its active role as a crucial methodological tool for literary text interpretation (the question is: how binary notions in scientific interpretive metatexts are related to the examined culture texts and traditions). Binary models are put into a context of ternary models as interpreted by J. Lotman and B. Uspensky in their 1977 article “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (until the End of the Eighteenth Century).” The theory expounded by the two scholars is compared with Lotman’s overview of Russian literature of the classical period (1992) where he gives further details on the two models manifesting themselves in 19th-century authors’ poetics. In the paper, the role of the neutral, inbetween semantic sphere is accorded special attention so as to clarify the real nature of Lotman’s suggestion in indentifying the meaning-creative energy of this middle, mediatory semantic zone. Through the investigation, the coherence of Lotman’s oeuvre is revealed, which refutes the possibility of interpreting the functionalisation of binary notions and their different uses within the framework of the structuralist or the poststructuralis paradigm. The universal cultural nature of thinking in oppositions is interpreted in concrete terms of the semiotic principles of meaning-engendering, explaining the issues of semantic difference (deviation), meaning-transformation (text-dynamics), the shift from binarism to plurality, and semiotic mediation. The paper ends with outlining future perspectives in the investigation of the problem of binarisms.