A Semotic Analysis Of The Picture Of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde(1854-1900), has been considered as a mirror for his Aestheticism by both Chinese and western scholars. The difference lies in whether the novel embodies Wilde's subjectivity or not when the two heat waves of appreciating and defaming came into being. Obviously, literary works do reflect social reality and embody writer's subjectivity. However, the artistic fascination exists beyond where the social reality and the writer's subjectivity are. It can makes conversation with readers from various times. It is better to compare its reaction formation to a distorting mirror than a plane mirror.Why does The Picture of Dorian Gray become more and more tensile with the passage of time? After lots of exploration and interpretation, Lotman's cultural semiotics gives a better presentation. Literary creation is a course of extracting, processing and transforming the social reality. And the length of life of literary text relies on the procession part. Instead of the writer's expression of deep feelings in the novel, the very condition for The Picture of Dorian Gray becoming a literary canon is a bridge built by the author through literary creation which makes the conversation with readers from various times possible. Moreover, new life and new meaning are given to the work through the literary aesthetic activities made by readers.In this thesis, we will begin our study with the subjectivity of Wilde's literary creation. On the basis of analyzing transcending social reality and transcending self-consciousness, we got a clue of the generating mechanism of text meaning. We can penetrate the polybasic meaning of the symbol'picture' based on the analysis of switch of narrative perspectives, space-time boundaries and multilinguality respectively. Hoping that this thesis will be a reference of value for further interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray from the semiotic perspective.