Verhaal en werkelijkheid: een tekstsociologisch perspectief

Samenvatting

Story and reality: a text-sociological perspective. The author examines the possibility of a synthesis between sociology and semiotics. On the one hand this project entails the conception of certain linguistic processes (lexical, semantic and narrative) as articulations of social interests: it is at the semantic level of relevance and classification that group interests penetrate into discourse. On the other hand, it entails the definition of such sociological concepts as collective consciousness and ideology in a semiotic context: the consciousness of a group is expressed in the latter's sociolect and the ideologies which interact in literary texts are discourses which have an impact on the narrative structures of a novel or a short story. Towards the end of his article the author illustrates his approach in three model analyses of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Camus' The Outsider and Jürgen Becker's Umgebungen.