Semiotics of textual animal representations
Semiotics of textual animal representations

Summary/Abstract: Art, including literary creation, relies on carefully selected, elaborated and sequenced representations of the reality that is accessible to us, as well as of the imaginary realms that need mediation in some art form, in order to be shared between humans. In the contemporary world, picture-based representations of nature, such as nature documentaries and albums of nature photography, and even cartoons and mobile applications, form a substantially more important way of consuming nature representations than the written word does. However, the focus of the present chapter is on literary representations, particularly on nature writing as a specific type of literary creation where the emphasis is on representations of nature. A number of principles that are employed in nature writing are also applicable to nature representations in other forms. The present analysis of nature representations is exemplified by the representations of birds in the text “Sounds” by Fred Jüssi, the most wellknown Estonian nature writer today. This text has elsewhere been analysed from a rigorously zoosemiotic point of view (Tüür 2009), and contextualised in the historical overview of Estonian nature writing (Maran, Tüür 2001). In the following, the notion of representation is discussed from the semiotic point of view, and it is subsequently associated with the concept of the nature-text as a complex semiotic object that is created in the interaction of natural and cultural elements (as elaborated in Maran 2007a). The underlying questions for the analysis are: How are nature-texts created, and what are the specific strategies of reading them? Where do our umwelten overlap with other species? What epistemological and conceptual difficulties arise when it comes to the mediation of other species’ umwelten by means of human sign systems?

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