Figuration in the Verbal Art Hardback - 1988

"We live in image worlds that do not merely reflect the empirically given but rather produce it in accordance with our symbol-making capacity," write the authors of Figuration in Verbal Art. The process of figuration has created language, myth, and culture; situated at the deepest level of human interaction with the world, it is of prime importance for theories of cognition and meaning. Applying a unified theoretical framework to a diverse range of subject matter, especially in Russian and Italian literature, Michael and Marianne Shapiro illustrate the centrality of figuration to imaginative art. In so doing, they carry out a sustained critique of contemporary literary criticism, particularly Deconstruction.

The book draws from several disciplines; rhetoric, philosophy of language, linguistics, stylistics, semiotics, epistemology, and literary history are those most directly involved in its argument. The conceptual section of the work and the readings show relations between the inherently tropological nature of language as a system and the tropological nature of style as a means for organizing perception. One of the distinctive contributions of Figuration in Verbal Art is the thorough integration of the theory of signs of Charles Sanders Peirce with the structuralism of Roman Jakobson. Another contribution is the emphasis on historical and cultural questions as an inalienable part of any analysis of texts.