Poetics reading of The passion (Tàzieh) of Husayn ibn Ali

After the traditional philology revolutionized by Ferdinand-de-Saussure, and a new structuralist approach toward language established by him, different branches of science were influenced and new forms and tendencies emerged among them. Anthropology, psychology, and even the natural sciences like physics and chemistry, couldn’t escape from this influence. Naturally, literature, which inherently depends on language, became more influenced and so many of the literary researchers began to redefine the literary science, using Saussure’s doctrine. Among these all, Russian formalists and French structuralists were two main groups which widened their research’s area and have been accepted in academic circles. On the two opposite sides of Europe, Russian formalist, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum, and French structuralists, such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, and Lucien Goldmann, applied Saussure's thought in literature theory and criticism. While between the members of either groups there was not any complete agreement on how to use Saussure's ideas, in the end they all had the same theoretical foundation based on saussurean linguistics. TzvetanTodorov succeeded to create a genuine combination of formalist and structuralist approaches. One of these methods, which is nominated as poetic reading has been elaborated in his book, “Poetique”. On one hand, using formalist approach, he underscores the language of a literary work, andon the other hand, he confines strulturalist approach to the very framework of literary work and overlooks anything outside the text. So, Todorov creates precise reading system of a work and calls it poetic reading, which investigates for universal postulates that have been manifested in specific literary works. In this article, we have tried to achieve a poetic reading of the Husaynibn Ali’s Tàzieh, using Todorov’s method. Poetic reading is a precise reading which attempts to analyze all aspects of a text, far from being engaged with paratexts, and determine the function of different aspects in its formation. In the following article, we attempted to shed light on some aspects of the Husaynibn Ali’s Tàzieh, trough poetic reading of the text. In this research, library books on Tàziehhave been used as a resource, and field research in this case was not considered. The nature of this research is descriptive, and the reasoning method is comparative. Todorov distinguishes three general aspects of the narrative text, the semantic (semantique), the syntactic (syntaxique), and the rhetorical (verbal). In the following article, semantic, syntactic and verbal aspects of Husaynibn Ali’s Tàzieh are studied, using viewpoints of Todorov.