An Analysis of the Plays? The Princess is Waiting? and? The Night Traveler? based on Yuri Lotman?s Model of Semio sphere

Establishing any type of communicative action in social systems requires the leading role of semiotic units. This element, as the smallest functional mechanism, has attracted the attention of numerous scholars. One of its most important aspects is Yuri Lotman’s semiotic approach, as the link between sociology and literature, which utilizes the power of fantasy in service of the community and is named ‘semiosphere’ as the interface of language and culture. Play is one of the most significant grounds relevant to the realm of social bias. In this area and in the contemporary Arabic literature, we see literary scholars, such as Salah Abdel Sabour, who express their views in different ways when facing important national and international issues. Abdel Sabour, like Lutman and Pierce, believes in a semiotic structure not only for the language but also for the whole universe. In line with his particular view, Abdel Sabour goes beyond that and assigns a new semiotic aspect to objects and types. The salient sample of this movement is vividly reflected in the plays of ‘The Princess is Waiting’ and ‘The Night Traveler’. In addition to the poet’s power in making meaning in these two plays, his divergence concerning a single issue is in the same historical period. As such, this paper aims at examining this issue based on Lotman’s model of semioshere. The approach used in this study is a thorough comprehension of the semiotic atmosphere of these two plays and re-analysis of the semiotic functions with regard to Lotman’ theory.