Review article The Semiosis of Literary Fantasy * Julio Jeha We can describe history as a narrative of the facts that happened to a people, usually as they organize themselves into a nation. For this to occur, the group must share customs, origins, and, more often than not, language. The building of a nationality is a semiosic event informed by an interpretant. There must be a relational content that links those facts and their cultural manifestations, a bridge between what happens and how it affects the civilization that experiences the phenomena. If this is true, then the American identity would result from a Gothic national narrative, the origin of which, according to Edmundson’s Nightmare on Main Street, Goddu’s Gothic America, and Martin and Savoy’s American Gothic, would be the feeling of guilt toward Native and African Americans and the fear of the future. Far from taking the national character as a final product, however, these authors consider it to be in a continuous genesis: a semiosic process where the interpretant is a Gothic mood that has generated signs in American literature since its colonial inception and is still doing so in premillennial American media. * Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Na- tion. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Robert K. Martin & Eric Savoy (eds.), American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. For their hypothesis to work a previous interpretant has to exist, an interpretant that distinguishes Homo sapiens sapiens from other animals as the only species able to introduce in experience objects that exist independently from the physical surroundings: emotions, illusions, and abstractions. This unique ability may be called poiesis, in contrast with mimesis; one characterizing the human use of signs as going beyond reality, the other marking the animal use of signs in its inescapable depend- ence on the physicality.