A Semiotic Reading of Houshang Ebtehaj's Poem "Arghavan" Based on Riffaterre's Approach

Semiotics is an interdisciplinary approach that examines sign systems in a literary work; Among the approaches to semiotics is the theory of Michael Riffaterre, a French-American theorist on the semiotics of poetry. According to this approach, the reader is a very important factor in the process of reading the text; Riffaterre believes that meaning is always present in the text of a poem and only the reader should extract it. In his view, the meanings of poetry should be understood on its own, not by referring its signs to external realizations, and understanding poetry requires the reader to try to find an intertwined network of signs, and in this regard, her approach can also be considered as a reader-cantered critique. In this research, Ebtehaj's poem " Arghavan" [English Equivalent: purple] has been analysed using Riffaterre approach. The central idea of ​​the poem is "the isolation of the poet in an inappropriate social space", which is expressed in different ways in the text of the poem. Although this idea is not mentioned directly in the poem, the widely used propositions and clichés of the language that the poet uses by repeating them in the process of "over determination" or through the "conversion" process, by modifying those propositions, or using the "expansion" process, by extending the general idea to more detailed ideas. In addition, by discovering two semantic processes of "accumulation" as well as "descriptive anthologies", which all come from the same source and guide the poem to induce a single theme, the descriptive anthology of " Azadi" (freedom) that evokes words such as "morning", "spring", "candle", "lamp", "sun", "dawn" and "sun"; In contrast to "Sharayet-e Namonaseb-e Ejtemaei" (unfavourable social conditions) that the "forgotten silent corner", "crypt" and "night of darkness" evoke the same concept.