The Semiotic Study On Lotman’s Poetic Text Analysis

Poetry is always regarded as one kind of expression of human emotion and experience, which is hard to describe in language because of its illogic, indistinct or even contradictory nature. The intelligentsia, both at home and abroad tend to discuss the essence of poetry in the following two types, one focuses on the the meaning conveyed via poetic text, and the other emphasizes structural characteristic of poetry organization. The former is discussed from the perspective of narration, while the latter is studied from the perspective of stylistics. The two methods of analysis above seem to be incomprehensive to reveal the true meaning of poetry. Poetry is a special ideographic way, so it is a difficult branch of poetry study upon how to distinguish poetry from other expressive means and find the special mechanism of poetry to convey meaning. Juri Mikhailovich Lotman (1922-1993), the late Tartu semiotic school founder and leader, and cultural semiotics pioneer closely integrated modern structure research methodology with the semiotic research, and created a new road for poetry, literature and the humanities.The study of poetic text of Lotman in the last 1970’s marked his transformation from a literary scholar to a semiotician, and established his position in the academic circles of the international semiotics. On the one hand, Lotman pursued to study the poetic text through the methods of natural science and linguistics, also he explored a more comprehensive and in-depth analysis method of poetic works without denying the humanities and historical consciousness. In Lotman’s opinion, poetry conveys meaning in a special way, which is generally fulfilled through the poetic structure. The structure of poetic text is the core problem of Lotman’s structural semiotic study. However, the attention to the structure did not lead to the neglect of text meaning. The structure and function of the text is directly associated with the meaning of the text. Lotman’s poetic text research is extensive, and his poetic text theory is an embodiment of dialectics nature and open dialogic essence. More importantly, Lotman neither confined his ideas to a certain kind of theoritical framework, nor within a pure methodology.This dissertation takes Lotman’s poetic text analysis theory as the research object, using the methods of induction, diachronic discussion and comparison. Firstly, this dissertation discusses his poetic text analysis is a critical absorption of the Russian formalism. In addition, Lotman’s structure poetics has been linked to system theory, information theory and control theory and other natural science originally. Then, the discussion goes to the hierarchy and level essence of poetry, unique structural levels in poetry, namely the lines, stanzas and poems, and the relationship among all levels of poetry and semantic generation mechanism, which is repeatedly stressed by Lotman. On this basis, this dissertation summarizes several important pairs of structure principles of poetic text analysis of Lotman: first, the "variant" rhythm and the "invariant" rhyme as the means of transmission and generation of new information for poetry; second, "repeat" and "parallel" as means to form meaning occur on each specific level in the poetic text; third, "monologue" expressed by poet and the polyphonic "dialogue" jointly uttered by structure elements on various levels of poetry; fourth, poetry, as the "second simulation system ", has the characteristics of "discrete coding system" and "continuous coding system", and is music flowing out in the time dimension and a drawing shown in the space dimension. Finally, this dissertation also compares Lotman’s poetic text theory with the "close reading" of Cleanth Brooks, one of the representatives of "New Criticism" and the poetry semiotic theory of the French Semiologist Michael Riffaterre.This dissertation aims to study the theory and practical analysis on Lotman’s poetic text, and deepen our understanding of the relationship between the text and the function. Poetry, as an important artistic text of human beings, is not a certain stationary object, but exits as a function, which plays the functions of information transmission, information generating and information memory.The conclusion of this research: the poetic text has the particularity in the realization of the above three kinds of function, it can not only store more information than other literary genres in tiny text, but generate no limit of new ideas in the unique way of the poetic text in the process of transmission and generation of the information. In addition, this paper also has commented on the methodology feature and Lotman’s contradictions.