Recasting the Debate: The Sign of the Library in Popular Culture

Abstract

This paper is an investigation of the hermeneutic possibilities in the semiotic image of the library represented in three movies—The Name of the Rose, The Wings of Desire, and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. It looks at the visual semiotization of the library of the past, present, and future utilizing Charles Peirce's semiotic model, in which a sign becomes a sign only because there is an interpreter for it, and argues that from the perspective of cultural semiotics a sign has no inherent/intrinsic meaning, that is, its meaning is contingent on context and, consequently, can be recast.