The work examines the representation of space and its rhetoric uses in contemporary literature. Space has always been a pervasive theme in literature, but a difficult topic in literary theory where no satisfactory response exists to the question "where from does the sense of space come to the text?" A semiotic approach permits to overcome this problem. Two directions are exploited in the work: the semiotic notion of space that unites the existential, structural and cultural aspect of spatiality, and Peirce's sign theory that emphasizes the mediative nature of semiosis and the interconnectedness of representation and rhetoric. The first chapter analyzes the basic features in Peirce's theory and integrates it into modern research in order to develop a framework for the analysis of spatial representation and its rhetoric uses. Representation, with emphasis on the notions of iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity, is examined in the second chapter. Peirce's theory is compared to and developed with insights from cognitive science and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The reader's creative imaginative work and textual determination emerge as central aspects for spatial representation. Peirce's views on rhetoric together with traditional and modern views on the art of speech are analyzed in the beginning of the third chapter. The interplay and interdependence of ambiguity and determinacy are foregrounded as essential. Specific issues of spatial rhetoric are then analyzed. The notion of locus is focused on in Milan Kundera's 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', metaphor in John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror", topographical description in Julien Gracq's 'La Forme d'une ville', focalization in Joseph Brodsky's "The Hawk's Cry in Autumn" and micronarrative in Yves Bonnefoy's 'L'Arrière-pays'. The readings point to the creative and undetermined aspects in rhetoric and the critical value they have. The concluding chapter proposes an overview on the results and arguments on the place and function the semiotic approach to literature may have in research. (Dissertation Abstracts)