The textual issues of meaning-making in theatre and film: a semiotic introduction

In the semiotics of culture, text is a complex notion. Text as a whole emerges at the touchpoint of innerand extratextual relations. Thus, text is a ternary whole made of signs (e.g., language is the ‛material’ for literature), specifically used (due to its artistic structure), and constructed in a certain cultural-historical context (including the author’s worldview, their life experience, etc.). As a result, textual meanings vary on the subtextual, textual, and functional levels depending on the semiotic resource (‛word’), text, and work of art. Scholars use a range of criteria to analyze the structure of the text as a hierarchical phenomenon. On the one hand, to interpret the text structure is to compare it with the structure of the sign system (a semiotic approach) and the structure of the work of art (a functional approach). On the other hand, the structure of the text can be analytically described as compositional (from the point of view of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, etc.), architectonical (title, epigraph, prologue, chapters, epilogue etc), or narrative (plot, story). The poetics of text, or the conceptual artistic whole, comprises the next level of analysis. Poetics is based on textual and intertextual characteristics, and proceeds from the conceptual value of the structural features of text. From the viewpoint of contemporary multimodal culture, the same text may exist in different discursive formats, especially on the web, thus becoming an interdiscursive phenomenon (cf. Wildfeuer, 2014). Long before the Internet era, the issues of disourse in text, and text in discourses were partly described by Bakhtin. Meaning-making and text mentality depend upon the medium. In different media, meaningsof the same text diverge (a) due to a particular purposeor target-oriented activity (resulting in crossmediality, which is characteristic of marketing, education, and so on); (b) motivated by the necessity of creating secondary texts (pictures, music, film and theater adaptations, translations, comic books, parodies, etc.) corresponding to transmediality. In both cases, text proves to be a result of convergence (cf. Pearson & Smith, 2015; Jenkins, 2006); in collective memory, the image of text is stored as a mental whole. Textual meanings, the structure, and poetics of text are its internal characteristics. The interdiscursivity of text may be either internal or external. Internal interdiscursivity, for example, is an upspring of the writers’ own illustrations as a part of their text as in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973). External interdiscursivity is a variation of the same text in different discourses for different target groups such as Homer’s Iliad in prose for adults and in adaptations or simplifications for children. Eco concluded: