Isotopy and textual coherence in Martin Camaj’s Fiction

Abstract

A text is considered as a linguistic entity made up of linguistic signs and characterized by cohesion and coherence. It is an occurring manifestation of language and as such it carries on a specific meaning. The definition of the meaning of a text is very complex. This is mainly due to the fact that it does not contain only explicit information but encodes a variety of implicit knowledge as well. The literary text is one example of this. The interpretation of the literary text broadly depends on the literary experience of the reader. The former only takes on life after it is realized by the latter. Semiotics makes extensive use of the concept of isotopy when it comes to the interpretation of literary texts. Isotopy is a concept from Greimas’s semio-narrative model, made up of semes, classemes and sememes. In practice, it serves as a strategy or principle that guarantees homologous interpretation of any text or text segment. The detection and identification of isotopies inside the text would provide different levels of familiarity within the narrative, offering so a uniform reading of it and at the same time proving its coherence and eliminating possible ambiguities. The prose fiction of the Albanian author, Martin Camaj contains a wide range of isotopic chains. Each isotopic chain represents a theme inside the narrative and is blended perfectly with all the other textual components. This article aims at providing a brief theoretical account on the concept of isotopy and through the analysis and interpretation of different isotopic chains inside the narrative of Martin Camaj coming to the conclusion that this kind of analysis is very important for a uniform interpretation of the text. This is also considered as a confirmation of textual coherence.