The Runaway Sign:

Semiotic Adaptation in Literary Analysis

Abstract

This article derives a notion of adaptation as a semiotic process from the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer and the Copenhagen-Tartu school of biosemiotics, suggesting it as way of considering fictional writing on genetics and evolution both empirically and analogically. Along these lines, I read changes in significations of reproduction and inheritance in Doris Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980).