Máquinas de la memoria: Emblemática y Semiótica

Abstract

The relationship between word and image has been researched from different theoretical perspectives. The emblem, as a hybrid textual type, has been approached from the perspectives of iconography and epigraphy in the analysis of the variety of genres derived from the triplex model, like the heavily codified languages of mute emblems and baroque hieroglyphs. The rhetorical procedures and traditions involved in the production and reception of these symbolic machines utilize the exemplum and the allegory, going through the progymnasmata, as the main strategies in the connection of iconic and verbal representations.

The purpose of this work is to describe the emblem from a semiotic point of view and explore the relationship between emblematics and the theatres of artificial memory as categories that allow the explanation of the complex interdependence between the visual and the verbal in its mnemotechnical function, where the effectiveness of the repertoire of symbol is built in museums of the imaginary. This takes the visual grammars of semiotics as well as the anthropology of writing as a starting point to propose a generative model of reading.