Augustinian and Saussurean signification in seventeenth-century poetry : preacher, maiden, sun, and leaf.

In this dissertation, I contrast a pre-Enlightenment with a post-Enlightenment approach to the interpretation of texts written during the seventeenth century. By employing Augustine’s triadic semiotics (as detailed in On Christian Teaching) as one framework, and by employing Saussure’s dyadic semiology (as described in Course in General Linguistics) as another, I conduct a comparative reading in order to evaluate the interpretation each framework yields in readings of poetry by George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson. Since human beings live in, think in, and create a world of signs, this project explores how a given theory of signs either energizes or vitiates reading a special kind of sign: poetry. I consider how a twentieth-century scientific approach to semiotics like Saussure’s foregrounds the sign vehicle and its associated concept as the central elements of semiosis. By contrast, while Augustine explores the relationship between the sign vehicle and its associated concept, the role and presence of the interpreter is essential to his vision of signification. The comparative reading in this paper is motivated by several pressing questions. What new or well-known features of a given poetic text assume prominence when viewed through a Saussurean or an Augustinian semiotic lens? How do the interpretational insights each approach elicits compare? Is one approach or the other more suited to interpreting a certain kind of text? And, how do the metaphysical assumptions sustaining a given approach affect the process of interpretation? In the end, I gather the evidence from the comparative readings to argue that, though they are often obscured in modern scientific methodologies, metaphysical assumptions matter deeply. And while Saussure’s semiology provides keen interpretive insights, as the dissertation reveals, not only is Augustine’s semiotic better suited than Saussure’s to interpreting seventeenth-century poetry, but also it provides the metaphysical grounding that any adequate hermeneutic and every act of interpretation demands.