Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 PhD student, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Payam Noor University, Tehran, Iran
2 Associate Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Payam Noor University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
The preface to Saadi’s Golestān is considered one of the foundational texts of Persian prose. Beyond its rhetorical and literary functions, it embodies a complex structure of cultural and semantic significations. Through the use of natural elements, religious references, philosophical reflections, and oppositional structures, the text creates a network of signs in which meaning emerges through the interaction of multiple layers of signification. Despite numerous studies addressing the literary and ethical dimensions of Golestān, the preface has received comparatively little attention from a semiotic perspective, particularly within the framework of Roland Barthes’s codes. The present study aims to analyze the production of meaning in the preface to Golestān through the cultural and semantic codes. The research adopts a descriptive–analytical method based on a semiotic reading of the text. The findings indicate that Saadi constructs a multilayered structure of meaning by establishing a network of semantic oppositions such as life/death, nature/writing, speech/silence, and heedlessness/awareness, within which mystical experience, philosophical reflection, and cultural order are intertwined. Furthermore, religious references, natural elements, and cultural beliefs function within the cultural code to activate the meanings of the text. Based on this analysis, the preface to Golestān can be regarded as an open text in which meaning is produced through the interaction between textual signs and the reader’s cultural presuppositions.
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