The 2027 issue of Semiotika will be devoted to reflecting on the relationship between sociocriticism (the sociology of text) and sociosemiotics. Sociocriticism proposes looking for sociality not beyond the text but within the text itself and considers semiotic text analysis one of the main tools for reconstructing sociality. This field of research considers context, primarily a social one, not as something external to the discourses of literature, cinema, and visual arts, but as part of those discourses themselves. By choosing to analyze social, historical, or ideological in a text and revealing that a work of art belongs to the cultural paradigm of a particular era, sociocritics give priority to text analysis, assuming that sociality can be reconstructed from the text itself, that the text is so powerful that "the reading can draw both the premises of its emergence and the consequences of its existence" (Pierre Barbéris). Sociocriticism is an interdisciplinary approach that uses various tools of textual analysis (e.g., semiotics, intertextuality theory, and visual studies) and combines them with historical and sociological interpretation. We invite the researchers to submit articles offering original sociocritical interpretations of texts and theoretical discussions for this thematic issue of the journal.
Thematic guidelines for article submissions:
- theoretical issues (text, social reality and ideology in semiotic theory; the relationship between sociocriticism and sociosemiotics, possibilities for their cooperation; critical reflections on sociocritical theory; problems of integrating different methodologies into sociocritical analysis, new theoretical directions, etc.);
- research in historical poetics; analysis of the sociality of literature and other art forms;
- the ideology and political dimension of text;
- the semantic dynamics of text in a changing historical context;
- the integration of sociocritical analysis into sociological research of literature or other arts;
- subjectivity and agency and their representation in artistic and documentary discourses and ego-documents;
- reading and interpretation as socio-semiotic instances;
- case studies revealing the social dimension of a particular discourse, its relationship to the historical context, the historicity of its semantic effects, etc.
Submission deadline: December 15, 2026
Please send your submission to sociokritika@protonmail.com
Semiotika is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed open-access academic journal. It publishes original research articles in Lithuanian, English, and French. No submission or publication fees are charged to authors. A detailed description of article structure, citation style, and other requirements can be found on the journal’s website in the “Guidelines for Authors” section.