Abstract
Semioticians obsessively talk about texts and their analysis. Yet, in the history of semiotics, few texts have been analyzed. One might even argue that semiotics has never analyzed texts. Indeed, semioticians, including the fathers of the discipline, have rather turned texts into pretexts: what mattered in their analysis was not to bring about a hermeneutic result (for instance, changing the way in which a community receives the significance of a text) but to demonstrate the validity of a method (for instance, reassuring a community, usually composed of other semioticians, about the epistemological soundness of a certain analytical procedure).
About the author
Massimo Leone (b. 1975) is a research professor at the University of Torino 〈massimo.leone@unito.it〉. His research interests include semiotics of culture, semiotics of religion, visual semiotics, and semiotics of law. His publications include Religious conversion and identity: The semiotic analysis of texts (2004); Saints and signs: The cultural semiotics of early modern Catholic spirituality (2009); Sémiotique de l'âme: langages du changement spirituel à l'aube de l'ãge moderne, 3 vols (2012); and Annunciazioni (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
