At a moment when 'literature' threatens to be collapsed into other discourses, or to be subsumed by such terms as 'narrative' and 'genre, ' Jurgen Dines Johansen, although he recognizes its protean nature, focuses on literature itself as it relates to other discourses. Using the semiotic theory of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce as the principal influence, Johansen applies, in a highly erudite fashion, psychoanalysis, psychology, literary hermeneutics, literary history, Habermasian communication, and discourse theory to literature, and, in the process, redefines it.

The...

A study of C. S. Peirce's conception of the sign, with a critique of Saussure and Hjelmslev, Dialogic Semiosis presents a semiotics of the production, transmission, and interpretation of signs in human communication. Jorgen Dines Johansen studies the process of sign creation, how signs fulfill their office of transmitting information between human agents, chiefly through a study of human speech.

In the first part of the book, Johansen focuses on Hjelmslev's concept of the sign and the study of semiotic systems. In Part II, he undertakes a detailed explication of Peirce's concepts of...