space production

Informed by Henri Lefebvre’s “Production of Space” theory, this study aims to explore Khaqani’s representation of prison in his “Prison Poems” in the light of the perceived, imagined, and lived space dialectics. This research adopts a descriptive-analytical approach and employs library sources. The results of this study show that in the perceived space, the poet, informed by phenomenological and critical perspectives, reinterprets the material space of the prison by confronting the veil and recognising the implicit mechanisms of power; in the imagined space, echoing the prescriptive knowledge of the discourse of power, the poet, as the subject, adopts a forced understanding of the space, which reveals the power and role of other groups in Khaqani’s imprisonment; in the lived space, the poet, echoing an implicit resistance against the discourse of power, employs his imagination and poeticity to create a different space within the realm of possibilities, which has no material correlation with the real prison but only adds a utopian meaning. This study concludes that the material space of the prison, the imprisoned poet as an active subject, and the discourse of power affect the ambience of Khaqani’s “Prison Poems.”   

The current paper aims at investigating the strategies of spatial production and representation in the Yārsān religion by focusing on a sacred scripture entitled bārga bārga. To this purpose, firstly the strategies employed for locating a referent in the text are explained according to space grammar as proposed by Levinson (2004). Then, we try to study the strategies of spatial production and representation in the text by applying the geocriticism approach (Westphal 2011). The results show that the text mainly employs three strategies of topology, deixis and motion to specify the location of a referent. In addition, the results demonstrate that the spatial ideas in the text are mainly based on two macro-metaphorical models (Caravan and dyeing). These models make a unified spatial-temporal complex in such a way that any spatial idea associates a temporal epoch (the principle of spatiotemporality). Additionally, the study indicates that the text, by using some strategies, challenges the established and formal spatial boundaries and reconstructs them in a new order to support its ideological intentions. Furthermore, this sacred scripture tries to deconstruct the strict boundary between the real and the fictive (referentiality principle) and also it employs divergent and numerous placenames in an innovative way in order to express its ideological and theological messages. Finally, it should be noted that these strategies are employed to present a new spiritual spatial ideology in the text.