Hope and Despair in Amal Donqol and Siavash Kasraei’s Poems (A Semiotic Analysis of Time-Place and Myths Components)

IntroductionSemiotics has provided researchers in the immediate past years with a tool for analyzing, understanding, and criticism of literary texts and discovery of hidden meanings. Semiotics has tried to unveil, decipher, and discover the deep meanings behind the structure. Amal Donqol (a contemporary Egyptian poet) and Siavash Kasraei (an Iranian poet) lived in their turbulent times. Political and social disorders intensively influenced the content and structure of their poems. The comparative semiotic study investigates meticulously and in detail the works of the Egyptian and Iranian poets considering hope and despair. It hopes to have a better and deeper understanding of the poets’ thoughts and spirits and their influence on their poems. Moreover, the study makes the ground for better presenting of the similarities and differences of their attitudes, as they live in rather similar conditions.Using the semiotics of the application of time, place, and myths, the study investigated the duality of despair and hope  in some poems of the two poets regarding the structure and poetic language. It tried to answer the question that how despair and hope have been presented in the poems and in mentioned components and how their poetic and artistic manifestations are.  Method This descriptive-analytic study was done within the American framework of comparative literature.  DiscussionSemiology (or semiotics) is a new type of criticism that has had a great impact on literary studies and related research. This field of study interprets literary texts according to such criteria and layers as time, place, intertextuality, narration, character, etc. This study explored the place, time, and mythical characters to show the appearance of hope and despair in the selected poems. The components work as codes for the poet through which he shows his inner feelings and imposes positive or negative meaning upon them. The analysis of the signs unveils the hidden layers of meanings in a literary text and familiars readers with the world, thoughts, and feelings of its writer.Time and place as signs and their signified are various and wide in literary texts and important for reading texts. The poets have used many words showing place and time. In many cases, adverbs showing the place in Donqol and Kasraei's poems lose the characteristic of being adverb of place and become a signifier having specific signifiers. The time adverbs have also been used in this way as their poems shows the change many times. The words become positively or negatively marked as they convey the poets’ feelings.  These words convey meanings different from their place and time meanings, which engages the readership with one of the dualities of despair or hope. Myth is also an important component that imposes meaning on the meaning in works of both poets. Using and recreating the myths, the poets communicate their ideals and spirits to the audience.   Conclusion- The study investigated the duality of despair or hope in the poems of two poets based on the application of some components of the semiotics of time, place, and myths. The socio-political conditions that the two poets live in seem to be the same and their poems protest against their contemporary situation, but based on the mentioned examples one can say that when the poems have been composed, when death and despair were dominant in the mental space of poets, he optimistically expected a bright future, whereas death and despair are always dominant in Amal Danqol's poems.- As a result of the different views of the poets, time, place, and myth have a hopeful and liberating application in the poems. In Amal's poems, however, the place, time, and myth components become nightmares of fear and failure, as a result of his sad and desperate creations.- Finally, looking from semiotic analysis, it can be concluded that the fully optimistic and hopeful poems of Siavash Kasraei sometimes lack poetic fantasy and becomes similar to prose, making it a weakness of the poems. On the contrary, Amal Danqol's poems, though exaggerates in expressing darkness, they are totally strong and surprising sometimes regarding poetic beauties, creating new meanings, and linguistic deviations. 

A Reflection on the Concepts of "Khvarenah" in Tarikh-e Beyhaghi

"Khvarenah" is an outstanding mythological concept that has survived in the post-Islamic Iran among the public and written works. Passing through a transformation process, from ancient times onwards, various changes have occurred to the quality and function of this concept and has made it an interesting and useful area of research with historical, sociological, psychological and even great rhetorical values. The present study, therefore, is to investigate the most important conscious and unconscious aspects of belief in "Khvarenah" by going through one of the most prominent Persian prose works of both historical and literary nature, i.e. Tarikh-e Beyhaghi. The aim of this study is to describe and analyze the details of belief in "Khvarenah" (Farreh) as manifested in both form and meaning of the mentioned work so as to clarify the largely half-hidden contribution of this ancient belief to the interpretation of events and the understanding of events and characters, and to indicate the evolution of its function up to the Qaznavid era. The findings showed that belief in "Khvarenah" is mostly manifest in the great events related to the kings, as well as, in some of their characteristics and behaviors. Rituals such as Mehregan also contribute highly to this manifestation. Deterministic approaches to Tarikh-e Beyhaghi in issues such as enthronement of the kings are reflections of this belief as well. Various manifestations of this concept in the form and content of this work reflect deviation in the function of "Khvarenah" from a mythological to a courtly and political function, and reveals the differences between some of its details and its ancient and genuine form