Semiose des Wunderbaren in Hagiographie und Märchen

Autor: Thomas Daiber
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: Zeitschrift für Slawistik. 63:236-263
ISSN: 2196-7016
0044-3506
DOI: 10.1515/slaw-2018-0018
Popis: SummaryThe Lives of Saints as well as fairy-tales eventually tell of animals which have the gift to speak. The categorization of phenomena like speaking animals is dependent on the epistemic structure of the narrated world. On the example of ‘speaking deers’ the paper outlines, that in hagiographic literature speaking animals are reported as miracles, which are to testify either the holiness of a place or the person they are speaking to. On the contrary, in fairy-tales speaking animals are part of the expected actors to appear in the structure of the narrated world and are not marked as miracles, at all. Consequently, the semiotic status of such phenomena can be differentiated: hagiography tends to symbolical or metaphorical meaning, fairy-tales to allegoric meaning. The difference between symbolic and metaphorical meaning in hagiography is shown in comparing two episodes including a speaking deer as if Christ himself is speaking. InVita Placida, the deer has the specific and contextually supported gnostic meaning ‘soul’, while inVita Hubertithe deer only takes iconically induced metaphoric meaning (wearing cross-like antlers = carrying the cross), but in the fairy-tale the deer is an allegory of a human character trait and thus can be substituted by another allegory without change of context.
Databáze: OpenAIRE