Nitra Symposium

In response to the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Pierce who explored three types of iconic signs (images, diagrams and metaphors), present-day scholars, among them Jørgan Dines Johansen, recognize three ways how a text may be iconized during reading: imaginative iconization, diagrammatization and allegorization. The comparative study takes a close look at how religious and secular suffering is represented and iconized in selected culture-forming literary and political texts of Slovak and North-American provenience. These texts include Slovak Romantic-national poetry and poetry of the Realistic period (by Pavol Orszagh-Hviezdoslav and Samo Chalupka and poetry and prose of the American Colonial and Romantic-Early National Period (Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and Maya Angelou). We will defend the argument that suffering is a significant and culture-forming motif in each narrative; however, it plays a very different role in the Slavic and North-American cultures. Whereas in the Slovak literary discourse, suffering is iconized as an unchangeable, permanent “ordeal”, the American literary discourse interprets suffering within the framework of the “American Dream”, as a challenge leading to a necessary change and resulting in wellbeing. Such interpretation, as demonstrated by the research in debate, involves and derives from all three modes of semiotic-pragmatic approach to literature: iconization, diagrammatization and allegorization.