A Cultural Semiotic Interpretation of Heaven Writing in Lewis’ The Great Divorce

Abstract

Heaven writing is an important theme of literature. CS Lewis, a contemporary British writer, uses rich symbols to construct heaven in his work The Great Divorce. This study analyzed those symbols through the lens of cultural semiotics. Guided by Yuri Lotman (Юрий Лотман)’s symbolism, this study separates them into traditional symbols and innovative symbols according to their functions as preserving and creating cultural memory. Traditional symbols are coded based on the conventions of cultural memory and derived from the past texts and they are used to set the surroundings and background; innovative symbols, embedded with the theme of the word, come from the reconstruction of the conventionalized expressions or contents in the new context, in order to produce new cultural memory.