Semiotic Profiles of Galician Popular Literature

Abstract

In this paper, I relate a set of practices and discourses concerning the popular Galician literary tradition, understood as an expression of the feelings and literary and rural life of the Galician people, which still survive at the end of our millennium. I approach this tradition from a semiotic perspective and through both diachronic and synchronic viewpoints, taking into account static and dynamic elements.

In these legendary echoes, which still resonate today in orientational metaphors, customs, and genres, I recover the traditions that link our past with the present. I also analyze the connection between culture and nature, in which human beings act as the guiding thread through a personified nature that adopts humanizing semes. Nature thus becomes another character, as if endowed with sensitivity and feelings, behaving as a living and powerful being that protects or torments human beings, hence their mutual relationship.