The Journal of International Social Research

5-21

Authors: Memet ABUKAN

Better understanding of the literary texts has made the analysis of what their semantic strata are necessary and this led to the emergence of many theories. Ontological literary theory is defined as an adaptation of the sociology of art to literature in order to review literary texts. According to this approach systematized by Roman Ingarden and Nicolai Hartmann, literary texts are layered physically and semantically and reviewed under the heads of phonetics, semantics, object, character and predestination, which are the ontic structure of the text. In this way, not only the surface structure called initial structure of a literary text but also back structure namely the deeper structure is analyzed and many points including the allusions and connotations are thoroughly discussed and interpreted. The points that cannot be interpreted or predicted by the reader in a literary text can be clarified in the reviews done with this approach and thus the literary text can be better understood. Indeed, in the review of the texts with dense semantic patterns like poems, this need becomes more evident. In this study conducted accordingly, ontological analysis method is generally discussed and one of the important building stones of Turkish poetry, Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca’s poem “Çağlarda” is reviewed in this framework. Thereby, to what each detail refers in the poem is revealed as a whole and semantic strata of the text is attempted to be reached.