Roman Jacobson Poetic Function Theory Study

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) is a famous Russian American linguist, literary theorist and semiotician of the 20^th century. As one of the founders and leading members of Russian Formalism, the Prague Linguistic Circle and the Linguistic Circle of New York, Jakobson made great contributions to the development of the 20^th century humanities, especially in the field of linguistics and poetics.Jakobson's theories are an important subject in humanities. However, compared with his contributions, there is not sufficient research on his theories both home and abroad; and a lack of a systematic study of his linguistic poetics particularly exists in China. Jakobson's poetics deals primarily with the specific difference of verbal art in relation to other arts and other kinds of verbal behavior, and the poetic function is the core of his theory and the key to his illustration of "literariness". Jakobson re-evaluates language as well as its constitutive elements and reveals the inner production mechanism of poetry on both theoretical and practical levels, which simultaneously expands our knowledge of poetry and language.This dissertation takes up Roman Jakobson's theory of the poetic function as research subject. It first discusses the theoretical foundations and the formation of the theory of the poetic function, and then clarifies "what poetry is" and "what poetry does" according to some important concepts in his definition of the poetic function. On this basis, this dissertation further illustrates the cause of the poetic function and its representations in poetry with examples from Jakobson's analyses of Puskin's lyrics and Shakespeare's Sonnet 129. Based on the criticism of literary critic Jonathan Culler, this dissertation compares the two structuralist poetics involved. Finally, it applies the theory of the poetic function to interpreting ancient Chinese poetry and tries to uncover the isomorphism of Chinese and Western poetics and the underlying universality of language and culture.This dissertation aims to deepen our understanding of the dynamic relationship between language and art and re-establish the role of Jakobson's theory in such understanding through the study of his theory and practice of the poetic function. In recent years when literary study has been colonized by the more powerful political, social, historical and cultural theories, Jakobson's theory of the poetic function particularly has more important theoretical and practical significance.