The Representations of the Shirt in Bassim Furat’s Poetry: A Semiotic Study

Abstract

Bassim Furat’s experience has recently gained a wide place in Arab critical and literary circles, having received a huge attention from many modernist critics. This paper, therefore, is set to comprehensively account for Bassim’s poems, particularly on the creative, innovative, and hybrid forms of figures and metaphors as represented in the shirt. The shirt, here, stands for various aesthetic manifestations that are purportedly implicated by the poet. The paper, thus, analyzes selected poems authored by B. Furat from a semiotic approach. The semiotic analysis of these poems can better explore the poet’s intentions and meanings concerning figures and metaphors. To conclude, Bassim used the shirt as a goal-achieving, purposely-intended, and aesthetically important figure in the poems under study. The implications expressed by the shirt, as a figure, have accordingly achieved broader religious, mythical, moral, patriotic overtones and senses, not to mention the suffering, loss, identity, and nostalgia.