Genette’s Reading of University of Tehran Logo

The present article intends to read the logo of the University of Tehran - as a visual text - using Gerard Genette’s transtextual approach. In this approach, by following the relations between the texts, the meanings of the constituent of the text are explained and, as a result, its connotation meanings are revealed. Genette is from the second generation of intertextuality, whose theory is known as transtextuality. In this approach, the relationship between hypotext and hypertext is examined from different perspectives to explain the multiple meanings of the texts. Genette describes transtextuality as all that sets the text in a relationship whether obvious or concealed, with other texts. Transtextuality can be include a variety types of text relationships: Intertextuality, Paratextuality, Metatextuality, Architextuality and Hypertextuality. -Intertextuality is as a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts.- A tittle, a subtitle, intertitles, prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords and etc. are paratext. - Metatextuality is the relationship most often labeled commentary. -By architextuality Genette means the entire set of general or transcendent categories types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary geners from which emerges each singular text. - By Hypertextuality he means any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext) upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary.In addition to, Genette calls the reduction or expansion relation between hypotext and hypertext as quantitative transformation which can be done in two ways: reduction of hypotext or expansion of it. Both of them is done by three ways: Reduction: Excision, Concision and Digest Expansion: Extension, Expansion and Amplification In return, pragmatic transformation deal with meaning changes between hypotext and hypertext. This function is done in three ways too: Transvaluation, Transmotivation and Transmodalization. In order to read the logo of the University of Tehran, it was examined in four stages: - Terms of intertextual studies: in this stage, the terms of study body were examined to be suitable for intertextual study. - Analysis: in this stage, the study body was analyzed into its constituent. - Intertextual relations: in this stage, the intertextual relations of constituent were described. - meaning significations: in this stage, the significations of component were explained. In this article, after explaining the transtextuality of Genette, the logo of the University of Tehran was analyzed and then read based on transtextuality. In reading this visual text, by explaining the intertextual relations of the constituent elements of the logo, its significations and connotations were explained. The general method of this article is fundamental in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytical in terms of method, and its data are gathered via library method. The results of the article indicate that the logo of the University of Tehran is an intersign text in which a combination of the symbols of the two pre-Islamic and Islamic periods can be seen; from the other hand, the pursuit of intertextual relations in this logo shows the implications of this logo on completeness and intellectual perfection, victory and thoughtful awareness, dynamism and mobility.