المنهج السيميائي وتحليل النصوص التاريخية

Abstract

The semiotic approach is a modern approach to analyzing texts of a historical and cultural nature. It attempts to uncover the symbolic patterns that regularly conceal themselves behind social phenomena or textual discourses, far from approaching historical events from the perspective of external description or linear interpretation. The semiotic approach contributes to transcending history as a record of facts and events to considering it as texts laden with meaning, produced throughout history by authorities, accumulated knowledge, and the collective imagination. In this context, history is not merely a series of facts and events, but rather texts bearing connotations that reproduce memory, identity, and legitimacy. Herein lies the importance of semiotic analysis in revealing the intellectual (ideological) and interpretive nature of historical records, whether political discourse, economic and social texts, documents, rituals, or mythological narratives. Therefore, the semiotic approach is an effective interpretive approach to deconstructing and analyzing historical texts, not as a reflection of the past and reporting on it, but rather as symbolic systems that produce and reposition meanings. In a specific cultural and authoritarian context, this requires a deep awareness of the central semiotic approaches as formulated by philosophers interested in this method. From our perspective, the reader-researcher cannot employ semiotic analytical tools for historical texts without knowledge and familiarity with the theoretical approaches they formulated.