Dręcząca nieoczywistość znaku (na podstawie opowiadania Vladimira Nabokova "Znaki i symbole")
The agonising nonobviousness of the sign (based on Vladimir Nabokov’s short story "Signs and Symbols")

Author(s): Teresa Dobrzyńska-Janusz
Subject(s): Media studies, Studies of Literature, Communication studies, Theory of Communication, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: sign; interpretation; ambiguity; cognition
Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the problem of recognition of sings and relevant understanding of their respective meanings, as well as the question of in what ways interpretative hypotheses determining the content of a literary work are conditional upon the reader’s cultural competencies and worldview assumptions. These considerations are related to my interpretation of Nabokov’s short story Signs and Symbols, which turns into a series of alternative readings. The ambiguity of the Nabokov text can be regarded as an expression of the author’s cognitive relativism. The proposed analysis leads to the conclusion that the story is about a cognitive drama of a human who endeavours to understand what is (or is not) a sign and what is happening in the reality surrounding him.

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