Semiotic

In Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), vampires and the protagonist are regarded as the incumbents of legend-based subject positions respectively. This full circle and chiasmastic changeability in the incumbency of legend-based subject positions have been read through several postcolonial and racial critical paradigms. The present study, while acknowledging the merit of these readings, puts the changeable incumbencies of legend-based subject positions of this novel within Julia Kristeva’s critical conceptualization of chora. Such a reading acknowledges the repressive features of becoming a legend in symbolic order of signification, and at the same time, bespeaks the eruptive and threatening inklings of the semiotic and irrepresentable aspects of becoming a legend for such orders. The reading also manages to distance itself from those studies and analyses which see in legends some transcendental or holy teleology. This study argues that it is the very irrepresentable but materialistic and heterogeneous developments in the process of legend formation which make the incumbencies of legends motile, semiotically enabling and eruptive, and overall choric. In the novel’s post-apocalyptic, always-changing and chaotic world, becoming a legend can ensure one’s symbolically irrepresentable but semiotically perpetual survival. 

In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the way the Anthropocenic set of circumstances is narrated could not be easily explained away through giving precedence to either materialist or structuralist narratologists. In this sense, neither the materiality of the environment nor the arbitrary categories and models of structuralists such as Greimas could determine the ultimate narratological scheme with which one could make sense out of such set of circumstances. Only through modifying the extant narratological categories and models and exposing their arbitrariness via indicating their incapability to contain the formidable materiality of the environment, one could reach a workable semiotic framework for devising a narrative out of the anthropocenic set of circumstances. Reaching this framework would be the present study’s research objective. As its findings, the study recognizes that such a framework would not give the agency of devising narration to either non-human/environmental or human entities in the anthropocene, and at the same time will be the result of the uneasy, yet workable, coupling of these entities. This framework would also acknowledge the uncontainable nature of the environment in the anthropocene, and turn both human and non-human entities into mere actants that have no particular motivation. The study uses the modified narratological models of Algirdas Greimas and Amitav Gosh proposed by critics like Hanes Bergthaller, Marco Caracciolo and Jean Paul Petitimbert to reach this semiotic framework.