The Structure of the Artistic Text

Introduction

“The Structure of the Artistic Text” appeared in Moscow in 1970 and grew out of the “Lectures on Structural Poetics” (1964) that Lotman had given in Tartu. Taking up Saussure’s distinction between language and speech and the information theory of the 1960s, it treats art as a secondary modelling system: art uses natural language as its material but organises it into a further language of its own. In a poem every level – sound, rhythm, rhyme, syntax, composition – becomes meaningful, and the more ordered the text, the more information it carries. The book also analyses the frame, the plot as the crossing of a semantic boundary, and artistic space. It became a founding text of Soviet structuralism and was translated into German (1972 and 1973) and English (1977).

Connections

Builds on

• Course in General Linguistics1916 · Ferdinand de Saussure

More works by Yuri Lotman

• 1984On the Semiosphere