The Roots of Textual Agency

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_1608
dc.title	The Roots of Textual Agency. The Semiotics of Motivation and Demotivation
dc.contributor.author	Leone Massimo
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/annali-di-ca-foscari-serie-orientale/2018/1supplement/the-roots-of-textual-agency/
dc.description.abstract	This introductory essay deals with the origins of textual agency and inertia. Texts predominantly work as indexes, icons, or symbols, according to Peirce’s typology of signs. These three types usually exert agency to an increasing extent. The essay seeks to determine the origin of this gradient in the dialectics between motivation and arbitrariness. The more a text is received as motivated, the likelier it is that it might exert a strong agency. This hypothesis leads also to an articulation of the rhetorics of motivation or de-motivation through which communities of interpreters can promote or demote the agentive force of a certain text.
dc.relation.ispartof	Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 54 \| December 2018
dc.issued	2018-12-06
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2385-3042
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2018/01/021
dc.peer-review	no
dc.subject	Agency
dc.subject	Agency
dc.subject	Arbitrariness
dc.subject	Arbitrariness
dc.subject	Inertia
dc.subject	Inertia
dc.subject	Motivation
dc.subject	Motivation
dc.subject	Semiotics
dc.subject	Semiotics
dc.subject	Text
dc.subject	Text

Research Article
open access

The Semiotics of Motivation and Demotivation

Massimo Leone Università degli Studi di Torino, Italia | University of Shanghai, China

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abstract

This introductory essay deals with the origins of textual agency and inertia. Texts predominantly work as indexes, icons, or symbols, according to Peirce’s typology of signs. These three types usually exert agency to an increasing extent. The essay seeks to determine the origin of this gradient in the dialectics between motivation and arbitrariness. The more a text is received as motivated, the likelier it is that it might exert a strong agency. This hypothesis leads also to an articulation of the rhetorics of motivation or de-motivation through which communities of interpreters can promote or demote the agentive force of a certain text.

Published

Dec. 6, 2018

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Keywords: Motivation • Text • Agency • Inertia • Arbitrariness • Semiotics

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2018/01/021

Copyright: © 2018 Massimo Leone. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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