„Rzeczy niezbędne dla żywej typografii”
“The things necessary for the living printing press”

On the semiotic dimension of John Amos Comenius’s "Orbis sensualium pictus"

Author(s): Łukasz Wróbel
Subject(s): Media studies, Studies of Literature, Communication studies, Theory of Communication, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Comenius; Orbis pictus; semiotics; sign; reference; presence effect
Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the semiotic analysis of arrays of iconic and verbal elements that create pages of John Amos Comenius’s "Orbis sensualium pictus" (1658). Bohemian pedagogue has composed each plate of the schoolbook as an analogon of the complete sign relation model. Comenius has shortened the distance between representations in the book and their referents: signs signify indexically, also inalienability of the referent as an object in the sign relation has been assumed and implied. Manifesting its encyclopaedic ambitions to encompass the whole of the pupil’s world, the book reveals itself as a complete semiotic system. Particularly modelled sign relations are in fact one of the strategies of generating the world presence effect within encyclopaedic space of the schoolbook.

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