The semiotic analysis of novels by Melih Cevdet Anday

Literary works can be analyzed via a lot of methods. In addition to being a theory, semiotics is one of these analysis methods. Semioticians, especially in France, Italy, China, Brazil and Estonia, deal with the analysis objects they have determined with semiotics, and produce remarkable studies on theory and method with what they put forward. In Turkey, semiotic studies have lagged far behind both in terms of published studies and semioticians trained in the aforementioned countries. On the other hand, no semiotic studies have been found on the novels of Melih Cevdet Anday, which is the subject of this study, which he published under his own name (Aylaklar, Gizli Emir, İsa'nın Güncesi, Raziye). For these reasons, it was felt necessary to conduct such a study. With this study, an analysis of the novels of Melih Cevdet Anday has been presented and it is aimed to contribute to the Turkish literature in the context of semiotic analysis. Throughout the study, the semiotic method and its less preferred "semantic variant" were tried to be applied on the literary text. With this experiment, the answer to the question of "what" the meaning of the literary text is, rather than "how" the meaning of the literary text is produced, was sought with the analyzes made in line with the semantic variant. The study is basically built on two structures: theory and practice. In the theoretical part, the logic, terms and analysis trajectory of literary semiotics are discussed from the perspective of semantic variants, in the application part, the four novels in the corpus were analyzed separately with the semantic variant of the semiotic method. A glossary has been prepared for the terminology used throughout the study and presented in the appendix, thus providing a relative solution to the problems experienced by Turkish semiotics studies in the context of the terminology. At the end of the whole analysis process, it has been seen that the semantic variant is more applicable than the classical variant of semiotics, and the analysis produces more productive results in the context of the question of "what" the meaning of the narrative is. According to this, The novel Aylaklar consists of the opposition of superiority/inferiority in terms of materially and spiritually. It can be said that the novel Gizli Emir is surrounded by the opposition of utopia and dystopia. An economic-based alienation process is handled in the novel İsa'nın Güncesi. It can be said that the novel Raziye is basically fictionalized with the themes of tradition/modernism and self-identification/alienation. This study is expected to be a source of inspiration for literary text analysis. Key Words: Semiotics, Semantic Variant, Melih Cevdet Anday, Aylaklar, Gizli Emir, İsa'nın Güncesi, Raziye.