A Night with Saturn

The flight of Voyager 1 past Saturn in 1981 provides an occasion for a semiotic comparison of reports in French newspapers (Le Monde and Libération), a popular science article (in, La Recherche), and specialized scientific articles in Nature. The texts differ in the distance supposed between reader and writer, in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, in characterization of the event and assumptions about readers' interest in it, and in their narrative structure. The analysis shows that popularizations and specialized scientific articles are not related in a simple dichotomy or scale and cannot be explained by a notion of the "general public"; rather, the various types of texts must be considered in terms of more complex relations between what are called in semiotic terms the enunciator and the enunciatee.