A TEXT IN THE SEMIOSPHERE: GUVERCINIM HARPUT’TA KALDI
SEMİOSFER’DE BİR METİN: GÜVERCİNİM HARPUT’TA KALDI

Author : Seda ARIKAN
Number of pages : 347-364

Abstract

Semiotics, appeared as a significant field in the history of thought in the beginning of the twentieth century, was applied to various scientific approaches and developed parallel to them. The approach labelled in the 1990s as “ecosemiotics”, “ecological semiotics” or “semiotic ecology” has taken an essential part particularly in literary studies that is the most significant branch of cultural transmission. Ecosemiotics formed by the idea that nature speaks via certain signs depicts the semiotic function between man and its relation to ecosystem. Ecosemiotics, accepted as a component of cultural semiotics, gets close to the fields such as sociology, ethnology, environmental psychology and environmental anthropology in this sense. By starting with the idea that all other systems beside human being have a semiotic structure, this approach examines the relationship between man and nature from a semiotic point of view. In this respect, it aims to be “ecologically literate” by observing how non-human systems are shaped also in literature. For this purpose, in this study, Hamasdeğ’s story collection titled Güvercinim Harput’ta Kaldı will be read as a “semiotic sphere (semiosphere)” which handles human and non-human beings in an ecological wholeness. Those stories reflecting an era in which material production concern had not destroyed nature with all the beings involved within her present a language by which nature speaks via signs. In the stories of Hamasdeğ, the reflection of sociological, historical, cultural even psychological history on the space attributes a kind of status of sign to the non-human beings besides human ones. That the stories were not written originally in Turkish but in Armenian, Hamasdeğ’s native tongue, holds a secondary importance in terms of semiotics when the stories are examined in the light of involved socio-cultural concepts and the common historical understanding. The primary importance is the cultural and ecosemiotic language involved in the souls of both languages. Hamasdeğ, in his stories, reflects the ecosemiotic language of the local culture of the area besides the figurative language spoken by the human presented not as the dominant of the ecosystem but as a part of it. In this respect, this study aims to analyze this ecosemiotic language as a representative of the cultural unity and ecological wholeness.

Keywords

Ecosemiotics, Nature, Culture, Hamasdeğ, Güvercinim Harput’ta Kaldı

Read: 757

Download: 255