| Summary: | Textual sociocritic aims at demonstrating that the sociality and historicity of literary texts proceed from the work accomplished by the textualisation (by the “mise en texte”, in the words of Claude Duchet) on the surrounding social semiosis, i.e. on the ways a society represent itself, what it used to be and what it could become, using all forms of language available in the historical conjuncture. In that regard, this critical perspective joins two acts of meaning: it leads to analyzing the process of sense opened by the text, and it evaluates the singularity of this process in relation to the circulation of signs and representations within the social space. In its view, textualisation’s activity is the product of an intervention on something which is already semiotized. It should not be surprising that such a heuristical approach has mobilized and adapted several semiotical notions. This paper attempts to underline the relations between semiotic and textual sociocritic, and it shows on which bases the adaptation of semiotic’s theoretical resources by sociocriticians is founded. Because the burden of proof always lies in concrete readings, two examples of textual analysis come next: the first deals with poetical works (Albiach, Houellebecq, Pey), the second is about a sentence of Jules Michelet studied by Roland Barthes when defining what he called “l’effet de réel”.
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