A Cognitive Analysis Of D.H. Lawrence’s Last Poems From The Perspective Of Figure-Ground Theory

With the rapid development of cognitive science, cognitive poetics began to show its broad prospect and became a mature subject with great potentials and explanatory power. Figure-ground theory, as one important theory of cognitive poetics, appeared firstly in psychological area and was raised initially by Edgar Rubin, the Danish psychologist. In 1975, American linguist Leonard Talmy began to make this theory applied to the studies of languages, and afterwards, many scholars conducted their static figure-ground analysis adopting this theory in fields of foreign language teaching, translation and stylistics. This theory then got further developed and was given clear definitions on figure and ground, and was characterized with the feature of dynamics. Peter Stockwell especially carried out his studies from the dynamic relations of figure and ground, and proposed the dynamic figure-ground theory, which emphasizes on “attractors” and their guiding effects on the reader’s attention, during which the reader’s aesthetic process as well as the generation of literary resonance can be analyzed and interpreted. With the application of the cognitive science in literary reading, the dynamic figure-ground theory not only can provide a new angle for analyzing the linguistic features and language effects in literary works, but also can interpret the reader’s resonance process in their reading from the aesthetic views.D. H. Lawrence(1885-1930) is the famous poet, novelist, dramatist as well as literary critic in Britain of the 20 th century. Many studies were conducted at home and abroad on the works of Lawrence but most of them were confined to the interpretations of the novels. At present, the studies of Lawrence’s poems have their obvious limitations: their study angles are quite narrow and most are thematic studies while few of them were conducted from linguistic or stylistic approaches, and no study was conducted from the perspective of cognitive science. This thesis takes Lawrence’s last poem collection Last Poems as the study samples and divided it into three parts according to their composing times and the relations of poems; and then based on Stockwell’s dynamic figure-ground theory, this thesis makes cognitive analyses of the representative pieces in this collection.The findings of this cognitive study can be concluded as follows. In the poems of first part, the spatial relations in Bavarian Gentians and the motion-stasis relation in Whales Weep Not! are the most obvious features. In these poems, the images of God and Goddess are frequently grounded so that those of human beings can be figured, showing the author’s affirmation towards the subjective initiative of human beings as well as his materialistic ideas during his creation. In poems of the second part, it is proved that the activeness in Only Man and topicality and agency in Death is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical stand in the most prominent positions. As the images in poems, human beings are weakened in terms of their activeness and topicality, which embodies the disappointment of the author to human beings and the industrial society they live in. In the poems of the third part, death as the main image experiences different figure-ground changes. The use of negation in The Ship of Death enables this poem to fulfill its three transitions: from mortal world to death, then to oblivion, then to rebirth; and the application of experiential notions in The Ship of Death and Phoenix makes the attractive levels of different images get enhanced or weakened in different degrees, hence the reader’s reading resonance can be influenced consequently. The poems of this part embody the author’s poetic reflection towards death and rebirth.This thesis believes that the interpretations towards poems from the perspective of dynamic figure-ground theory are able to find motivations from linguistic and stylistic perspectives in analyzing the themes of poems and their aesthetic significances; moreover, these analyses can also provide relatively scientific explanations for the reader’s resonance processes.