Towards a Semiotic Theory of Transmedia Characters

ABSTRACT:On the basis of a recognition of the semiotic theories on character, this paper aims to identify some cornerstones useful for developing a theory of transmedia characters. Firstly, we will reconstruct the troubled fortune of the notion of character in French structural semiotics which reduced it to a combinatorial conception, according to which the identity of the character relies first of all on the fact of being a lexical unit that can be analyzed and decomposed, like the phoneme, into a series of "distinctive features" (Lévi-Strauss) or "semes" (Barthes; Greimas). Greimas even rejects as useless the idea of character and splits the concept into the dichotomy actant/actors, on the basis of a distinction between the being and the doing that refers to Aristotle and the privilege he conferred upon action. Hereafter we will focus on two broader visions which go beyond textual immanence: the semio-pragmatic conception of Philip Hamon—where a character effect produced by a text is linked to the reader's memory synthesis—and the socio-semiotic conception proposed by Marrone, for which the construction of characters is the result of a combination of intertextual relations. On the basis of these developments, in the last part we will re-read the observations on the nature of the character developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his still little known studies on the Germanic legends. Ultimately, Saussure's conception of the character as a cultural construct may offer a significant contribution to a transtextual study of the character.