Nežinomas Greimas egodokumentų archyve
The Unknown Greimas in the Egodocumentary Archive

Summary/Abstract: The paper tests an egodocumentary approach to the bibliographical and archival heritage of Algirdas J. Greimas that has been collected, systematized, and examined at the A. J. Greimas Centre for Semiotics and Literary Theory, Vilnius University, since 2015. The major advantage of an egodocumentary perspective is its focus, implicit in the term itself, on continuities that link the person’s different activities and concerns into a single life project, which enables a hermeneutic effort of interpreting documents of various genres in relation to one another within the whole of an egodocumentary corpus. This perspective allows to identify three documents that Greimas produced but did not publish in 1957–1960 (the first “Semantics” discarded in 1957, an unpublished autobiography from ca. 1960, and an unfinished book project conceived at the same time) as expressing the same unsuccessful attempt at self-realization, while their later, published versions (the 1966 Structural Semantics, “An Attempt at an Intellectual Autobiography” published in 1985–86, and the 1991 collection “Iš arti ir iš toil”) appear to successfully complete these attempts. The crystallization of semiotics as an original and rigorously articulated perspective on the world and oneself emerges as a most significant factor in the formation of Greimas’s world-vision and self-perception, while Greimas himself surfaces as a consistent personality employing all available means to make his existence meaningful and to understand the constitutive conditions of meaning itself.

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