Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories from the perspective of literary semiotics

Semiotics which is defined in its simpliest form as the study of signs has developed rapidly since 1960's until the current time, and it has headed to a greater aim than the one it involves in its name. This aim which is far beyond the identification of mere signs or the functional classification of them is to explain the way the signs get systematized and to examine those systematized signs. One of the systematized signs is the piece of literature. A work of literature is a systematized sign which is consisted by the integration of linguistic signs. It is the literary semiotics that has undertaken the analysis of such a sign system. When we assume that we live in a world full of signs, it would not be faulty to assert that there are lots of systems formed by the same kind of signs, and lots of semiotic enterprises to analyze them. One of those enterprises is literary semiotics. In this study, three horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe have been analyzed by taking into consideration of the tenets of literary semiotics. The aim of the study is to present the ways of implementing semiotic analysis and to examine the semantic universes of the stories. In the conclusion of the study, the issues involving in what ways Poe created the sense of horror, and on which oppositions he structured his stories have been revealed. In the light of the findings, it has been identified that the directions of transitions in three stories are from life to death, good to evil, from existence to absence, and from bright to darkness. The study consists of four main chapters. In the first chapter, the aim, importance, problem and assumptions of the study have been identified. There is also a literature review part comprising the variable studies in Turkey and other countries in the field of semiotics. In the second chapter, a comprehensive explanation of semiotics has been made, and information on its history and development has been given. Then, it has been given place to the studies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure who are the two important names of current semiotics. Subsequently, there has been given information on Algirdas Julien Greimas who is accepted as the founding father of literary semitoics, and Paris School of Semiotics. Lastly in this chapter, the semiotic method of the study used for the analysis of Poe's stories, and sequence of its implementation have been defined. In the third chapter, three horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat" and "The Cask of Amontillado" have been analyzed. Each story has been examined in three levels which are respectively discursive, narrative and deep-abstract levels. The reason for doing so is the tendency of semiotics to handle a text as complete as possible. The fourth chapter is the last one in the study. In this part, the gathered outcomes of the analysis performed in previous chapter have been presented, and it has been attempted to give answers to the basic and sub-problem questions. Keywords: Literary Semiotics, Greimas, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, Semiotic Analysis, Horror Story