Halilou Hmadou's Elegiac Poem on (Haiya) Sheikh Aboubakar Haroun: A Pratical Study in the Light of the Structuralism

Abstract

Structuralism is a holistic methodology from which most contemporary critical approaches emerged, and within its framework, the most prominent theories for discourse analysis crystallized. Structural theory in contemporary thought has become interwoven with all branches of human knowledge. Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the pioneers of this approach, defines the purpose of structuralism as being "everything that possesses the character of a system." Through his research, he concluded that there are "unconscious, universal mental structures common to all human cultures despite their differences and disparities, and that the only means to uncover these structures is language." This is because each language possesses its own specificity, system, and rules amenable to linguistic description.

   From this standpoint, we can pose the fundamental questions: What is structuralism? What are the methods and mechanisms of structural analysis in analyzing poetic texts? What is the impact of the linguistic approach on the study of literary texts? We may also inquire: How have both the West and the Arabs contributed to building critical theory? Can Western structuralism be considered the fundamental cornerstone upon which Arabic structuralism was built? How can linguistic knowledge be utilized in the analysis of poetic discourse to identify its characteristics?

    This study aims to uncover the nature of the interdisciplinary synergy between linguistics and contemporary critical methodologies, the extent of the influence of Saussure an linguistics on them, and the linguistic roots from which structuralism extends. Furthermore, in this structural analysis of Halilou Hmadou's Elegiac Poem on (Haiya) Sheikh Aboubakar Haroun, we seek to reveal the capacity of structural analysis to study and analyze poetic discourse. We will employ various levels of linguistic analysis: the morphological level, the lexical level, the syntactic level, and the semantic level.