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The goal of poetics is to understand the special way a verbal work of art carries meaning, how it conveys simultaneously a message and an awareness that this message is an artifact.
Semantic and formal constant features of literature can be identified that may help define a literary kind of sign. Intertextuality1 offers an effective model for the understanding of the relationships between these features. No definition of a specialized literary sign can have any validity, however, unless it can be integrated in a general theory of signs. I propose therefore to test poetics against semiotics by fitting intertextuality into the triadic model that C. S. Peirce proposed for semiosis, and to show in particular a parallelism between his interpretant and the type of intertext that generates the literariness of a text.
Intertextuality is the reader's perception that a literary text's significance is a function of a complementary or contradictory homolog, the intertext. The intertext may be another literary work or a text-like segment of the sociolect (a fragment of descriptive system [Riffaterre 1978: 39-40, 1983a: 39-41, 49-56, 200-1], for instance) that shares not only a lexicon, but also a structure with the text.
Significance is understood as the interpretation the literary text forces upon the reader. It combines two factors, a semiotic transformation and the inference the reader draws from it. The transformation affects simultaneously a sequence of discrete meanings identified through a first heuristic reading. A second reflexive, comparative, retroactive reading makes the reader discover that the sequence must be seen rather as a network or system which converts its components into variants of a single representation. The inference is that this overall shift is verbal art. We sense that the text is an artifact because it displaces natural or habitual semantic relationships with an ad-hoc system that deprives words of their presumed referentiality, making them signify together, as a whole, something other than what they would mean sequentially. The artifact presupposes in turn the presence of an author, and we unavoidably assume that its dependence on the writer's real or imagined intention modifies and supersedes its dependence on linguistic usage and on the users' consensus about reality.
The reader has to read twice and look for semiotic relationships other than the rules...