The interlingual reader as a semiotic pendulum: A Reader-response approach to Kongoli and Roth
The interlingual reader as a semiotic pendulum: A Reader-response approach to Kongoli and Roth

Summary/Abstract: This study proposes a recursive interpretive movement, referred to as the “semiotic pendulum,” for reading Lëkura e qenit (“The dog’s skin”) by Fatos Kongoli and The Human Stain by Philip Roth from an interlingual reading perspective. Rather than merely comparing the novels as textual objects, the article looks into how reading across Albanian and English reorganises the reader’s understanding of both works. Kongoli’s novel provides a first semiotic repertoire in which Roth’s treatment of temporal memory, veiled identity, social regulation, anonymous denunciation, and erotic agency is partially recognised. Thus, Roth’s novel recontextualises Kongoli’s novel, leading to changes in the reader’s perception of characters, symbols and narrative structures. There is no translation relationship between these two novels, and their historical contexts are distinct: Kongoli’s fictional universe is grounded in the Albanian communist and post-communist experience; Roth’s novel deals with American racial identity, passing, institutional conflict, and late-twentieth-century moral judgement. Their correspondence is therefore partial and asymmetrical. The interlingual reader is a semiotic mediator who creates, tests and adjusts links between literary systems without losing a local cultural identity. The study contends that literary globalisation is not merely the circulation of texts but a mutually constitutive process of reading in which local repertoires actively shape the reception of world literature.

• Details
• Contents