Taking into account Morris’ classic tripartite division of semiotics into syntax, semantics and pragmatics, it may be convincingly argued that, in the twentieth century, literary research has undergone a fundamental shift in orientation, from a basically text-oriented (i.e. syntactic and semantic) towards a more context-oriented (i.e. pragmatic) approach. This global ‘pragmatic turn’ may be discerned first of all in a number of theoretical and methodological studies, in which considerable stress is laid on so-called ‘extrinsic’ factors, such as literary institutions (publishing houses, libraries, periodicals, etc.), ideological influences on literature, or the specific cognitive and emotional abilities of particular readers. Moreover, a similar attention to the contextual embedding of literary phenomena is currently displayed in the concrete historical analysis of particular corpora and cultural phenomena as well.
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