Spatial Sign Rhetoric in Gulf Poetry at the Turn of the Third Millennium

Abstract

The presence of spatial signs in the Arabic poem is not limited to being a ‘subject’ that the poet writes about, but goes beyond that to being a ‘technique’ with which the poet writes, and between writing ‘about’ and writing ‘with’ the poem moves and the Arab poet is creative in forming his poetic world, and the aesthetic world of the poem, the poet does not write a newspaper reportage about the place, but he employs a spatial sign, and the sign in turn works to broadcast its intellectual and aesthetic energy, the sign with its linguistic status is a linguistic element that is included in the fabric of the poem and not just an element external to it, which makes it an essential partner in the formation of the poetic text. This makes it a key partner in the formation of the poetic text. Throughout its history, the Arabic poem has presented thousands of spatial signs that participated in the formation of its entity, and necessarily participated in the formation of its aesthetics, but scholars have viewed them as mere subjects or mere elements that form the space of the poem without trying to discover the aesthetics of their presence. The study attempts to adopt a poetic model that has its own artistic nature and its own temporal and spatial boundaries (the Arabic poem in the Arabian Gulf region at the beginning of the third millennium), with the aim of achieving three objectives that discuss its questions and fulfil its hypotheses: To identify the most important spatial signs in the poem, explore the ways in which they appear and recognise the patterns of their presence, and then explore the rhetoric and aesthetics they achieve in the context of the poem. The study seeks to answer two main questions: How was the presence of the sign in the poem? What did the presence of the sign add to the poem? Its material was formed through three main axes that represent spatial circles that expand from the nearest to the farthest geographically: The local place (the poet's country and its spatial spaces), the regional circle (the large Arab world), and the global circle (the places outside the Arab world that the poem under study approached). The study achieved its results by analysing the poetic energy of the studied texts in a primarily aesthetic manner, looking at their deeper levels and the relationships between the spatial signs on the one hand, and the relationship between the spatial sign and other textual elements.