doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2022.8.3.337
A Cultural Semiotic Interpretation of Heaven Writing in Lewis’ The Great Divorce
Tongtong Shi
- Xi'an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, China.
Abstract
Heaven writing is an important theme of literature. CS Lewis, a contemporary British writer, uses rich symbols to construct heaven in his work <em>The Great Divorce</em>. This study analyzed those symbols through the lens of cultural semiotics. Guided by Yuri Lotman (Юрий Лотман)’s symbolism, this study separates them into traditional symbols and innovative symbols according to their functions as preserving and creating cultural memory. Traditional symbols are coded based on the conventions of cultural memory and derived from the past texts and they are used to set the surroundings and background; innovative symbols, embedded with the theme of the word, come from the reconstruction of the conventionalized expressions or contents in the new context, in order to produce new cultural memory.
Keywords
- Symbols
- <em>The Great Divorce</em>
- cultural semiotics
- Yuri Lotman
How to Cite
Tongtong Shi, "A Cultural Semiotic Interpretation of Heaven Writing in Lewis’ The Great Divorce," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 142-146, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2022.8.3.337
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).