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Semiose des Wunderbaren in Hagiographie und Märchen

Semiose des Wunderbaren in Hagiographie und Märchen SummaryThe Lives of Saints as well as fairy-tales eventually tell of animals which have the gift to speak. The categorization of phenomena like speaking animals is dependent on the epistemic structure of the narrated world. On the example of ‘speaking deers’ the paper outlines, that in hagiographic literature speaking animals are reported as miracles, which are to testify either the holiness of a place or the person they are speaking to. On the contrary, in fairy-tales speaking animals are part of the expected actors to appear in the structure of the narrated world and are not marked as miracles, at all. Consequently, the semiotic status of such phenomena can be differentiated: hagiography tends to symbolical or metaphorical meaning, fairy-tales to allegoric meaning. The difference between symbolic and metaphorical meaning in hagiography is shown in comparing two episodes including a speaking deer as if Christ himself is speaking. In Vita Placida, the deer has the specific and contextually supported gnostic meaning ‘soul’, while in Vita Huberti the deer only takes iconically induced metaphoric meaning (wearing cross-like antlers = carrying the cross), but in the fairy-tale the deer is an allegory of a human character trait and thus can be substituted by another allegory without change of context. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Zeitschrift für Slawistik de Gruyter

Semiose des Wunderbaren in Hagiographie und Märchen

Daiber, Thomas
Zeitschrift für Slawistik , Volume 63 (2): 28 – Jun 1, 2018
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References (9)

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2196-7016
eISSN
2196-7016
DOI
10.1515/slaw-2018-0018
Publisher site
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Abstract

SummaryThe Lives of Saints as well as fairy-tales eventually tell of animals which have the gift to speak. The categorization of phenomena like speaking animals is dependent on the epistemic structure of the narrated world. On the example of ‘speaking deers’ the paper outlines, that in hagiographic literature speaking animals are reported as miracles, which are to testify either the holiness of a place or the person they are speaking to. On the contrary, in fairy-tales speaking animals are part of the expected actors to appear in the structure of the narrated world and are not marked as miracles, at all. Consequently, the semiotic status of such phenomena can be differentiated: hagiography tends to symbolical or metaphorical meaning, fairy-tales to allegoric meaning. The difference between symbolic and metaphorical meaning in hagiography is shown in comparing two episodes including a speaking deer as if Christ himself is speaking. In Vita Placida, the deer has the specific and contextually supported gnostic meaning ‘soul’, while in Vita Huberti the deer only takes iconically induced metaphoric meaning (wearing cross-like antlers = carrying the cross), but in the fairy-tale the deer is an allegory of a human character trait and thus can be substituted by another allegory without change of context.

Journal

Zeitschrift für Slawistik – de Gruyter

Published: Jun 1, 2018

Keywords: Gnosticism; stag’s antlers; metaphor; allegory; fairy-tale

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