De Tex fabula narratur

Abstract

The prefaces, that precede a text in lineal succession, are conclusions in advance. If they are the result of a reading and not texts of agreement they lend themselves to general reflection. Brevity, being the rule of the genre, demands the icastic formation of the theses and encourages reformulation of the hypotheses.

In the preface of a book on the comic strip, Alberto Abruzzese challenged the information theoreticians “to read many comics, from those which are serial and collective from mass civilization to the post-modern ones produced by an author, and run the promising risk of finally discussing both the comics and their own cultural models” (Abruzzese, 1994). This work makes a theoretical proposal or a suggestion of method. Semiotics can take on the challenge and Abruzzese’s doubt with two conditions: (i) if it accepts that languages of mass culture are directly reflexive, or rather, that they contain their own theoretical level expressed with autonomy of the media.

The deductive semiotic instruments are always registered textually, or in other words, applied and dis-implied from the text. On the other hand (ii) present sociology should adjust the necessary critical distance so that pertinence to the process of production, communication and interpretation of the languages may be transformed into signification. The reason why the participation of the imaginary collective becomes “comprehension” is found in the level of “explication”, typical of semiotic mediation (Fabbri 2001a). Mediation that is situated on the level of texts where the plane of sense and value is constructed, and not only represented, along with the second grade references and the virtual intersubjective relationships that enlarge and deepen our ingenuous (taken for granted) ontology (Ricoeur).