Palestinian poetry as an example of semiotic analysis

This study aims to demonstrate the richness of modern Arabic literature and the potential of literary works to understand society, using Palestinian literature as an example. To achieve this goal, R. Barthes' semiotic methodology was adopted. Using Barthes' perspective, a set of basic signs was selected for each poem and examined in terms of their literal and figurative meanings. In the explanations made in the context of denotation, care has been taken to make use of ancient dictionaries from time to time to reflect the richness of the Arabic language. In the connotation plane, the focus has been on the socio-cultural dimension of poetry; thus, emphasis has been placed on interpretation with an approach that examines and substantiates the reason for the writing of the poem. In broad terms, the process of the study began with searching for patterns in the meanings of poems in Palestinian literature, followed by classifying the topics on which the poems focused and then forming themes. The findings revealed that poetry was intertwined with political conditions and, as a result, poetry was assigned two functions in addition to its literary dimension: The first is to reveal Palestine's resistance and thus to convey the ongoing struggle of the Palestinian people through the poems, and the second is to decipher the logic of settler colonialism through the responses given by the poems. With the first goal, the aim of this study is not to limit Palestinian literature to resistance and erode its literary dimension, but to make it a part of the resistance. Since the reflection of the resistance in the poems will indirectly shed light on what they resist, the poem has been instrumentalized in the study to allow for the literary dimension as well as to make sense of the colonialism in Palestine. Based on all these, the general purpose of the article is to present a literary and sociological perspective by examining the poems with the semiotic method in order to explain the themes created. thus, drawing a multi-faceted portrait of Palestinian literature between 1948 and 1980.