Formulation of a model for analyzing narrative and ritual in Lotman's semiotic sphere

Popular culture and literature can be seen as a field in which meaning emerges through the shifting between narrative, ritual, and collective action. Despite the breadth of studies in this area, the question of the semiotic logic governing these shifts remains unanswered, and the connection between narrative forms and ritual actions has often been reduced to the level of description.The present article attempts to reinterpret this issue from a semiotic perspective and examine the possibility of understanding popular culture in the form of a dynamic semantic mechanism. Relying on Yuri Lotman's theory of cultural semiotics and with a qualitative-analytical approach, the research analyzes three prominent examples of Iranian popular culture and literature as fields of semantic translation.The analysis focuses on how meaning passes from narrative systems to ritual actions and the role of cultural memory in organizing these processes. The findings show that narrative and ritual in popular culture operate in a translational and boundary-boundary nexus, and meaning is produced in the tension between these areas.The outcome of the research is to present a conceptual model that formulates popular culture and literature as a living sphere of interaction between sign systems; a sphere in which cultural memory, borders, and translations play a central role in the continuity and transformation of meaning.