Transformations and survivals: Notes on the problem of intersemiotic transposition

Abstract

Any valuable theory of meaning, sooner or later, has to tackle the problem of the relationship among the different semiotic modes that the old structural linguistics dismissed in the name of the preeminence of the language. The study of the transformations that take place when a work, genre or a fragment of work move from one medium to another and the consequent survivals (in terms of what remains, in one way or another, in the target text) is a privileged field for the analysis of the means in which the meaning leads its way. In this work, we propose a novel approach to the problem of the intersemiotic transposition, based on the critical analysis of some classical ideas of linguistics from the last century, in order to arrive at the concepts of transformation and survival taken from two theoretical lines adjacent to the discursive field: the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the visual theorist Aby Warburg.