A Study On Semiosis In Visual Poetry

With the development of visual culture, we can find that “visualization” has become a main trend in society. The progress of visual technology and the diversity of visual media have been creating new visual beauty. Under the background of visual culture, it is not comprehensive enough in the interpreting and appreciating of visual poetry by only using the theory of literary criticism and linguistics. Accordingly the paper set out to apply the theory of semiotic, namely the concept of semiosis to the appreciation of visual text as I believe that it may at least add a new perspective to literary criticism of visual text. Visual poetry, as a special literary genre and visual text, attracts scholars’ attention at home and abroad.Previous studies on visual poetry can be summed up from six perspectives, namely literary, stylistics, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis and semiotics, which constantly enrich and develop the studies on visual poetry. However, the studies on literature, stylistics and functional linguistics focus on the superficial aspects of visual poetry, ignoring the internal cognitive mechanism. Multimodal discourse analysis is simply involved in the superficial study of visual poetry, and no further analysis on the various elements of the relationship among modal constructions. Although cognitive linguistics perspective goes deep into the study of internal mechanism in visual poetry, the one-sided problems still exist. In China, the studies on semiosis of visual poetry from the perspective of semiotics are rare,without specific analysis. Some scholars establish models to analyze the meaning construction of visual poetry, but there still exists some inadequacies in these models. Based on the findings, this paper tries to establish a new framework to explore semiosis of visual poetry from theory of semiotics, aiming to make up the limitations of previous studies to some extent.Based on Peirce’s theory of semiotics, especially concept such as sign triangle and metaphorical iconicity, this paper proposes a new analytical framework in interpreting the visual poetry. Through the analysis of semiosis on some visual poems within framework, this paper concludes that with the help of semiosis, the real motif that a poet intends to show can be seen explicatedly, and that such a concrete and comprehensive explanation will give the iconic meanings to poetic forms so that they resemble the real motif. In this way, the poetic meanings and forms are integrated as a whole; as a result, the poetic meanings are promoted by such iconicity. From this point of view, we can say the analysis of semiosis on visual poetry within the framework is feasible and reasonable, for semiotics has a strong explanatory power to interpret the metaphorical expressions with novelty and poetry.In this paper, the main contributions are as follows: first of all, my study proves that semiotics has a strong vitality in interpreting visual poetry, especially pattern poetry and concrete poetry. Secondly, the semiosis framework I set up in analyzing visual poetry in the paper. In the process of framework building, the author believes that the relationship between verbal mode and visual mode of visual poetry is optimal relevance. Finally, my study adds a new perspective to literary criticism especially visual poetry.