An Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's Poems From The Perspective Of Functional Grammar--A Genre-Centered Approach

Emily Dickinson was one of the best poets America ever created. She did not receive much formal education but she read widely at home. Ever since the age of 20, she has lived a secluded life. When she confined herself in her house with her family, she merely contacted with the outside world by life-long correspondence. But in her life, she has produced 1,775 known poems as well as hundreds of letters.Reclusive in her father's house, she kept exploring the essence of life, nature, love, death and so on, which are reflected in her poems. In the current thesis, we will select two kinds of genre:Narrative Poem and Descriptive Poem to make the analysis. Narrative Poem is to tell the receiver what has happened or tell the audience stories. Descriptive poem is to describe objects or backgrounds. Hallidayan linguists hold the view that genre gets into text by generic structure. The role of the generic structure is the role of'language as the projection of a higher level of semiotic structure'(Halliday,1977:193). Therefore, for the first step, we are going to analyze different text types at the genre plane, unveiling the generic structure of the two text types.What is more important in the thesis, it is to dig out the hidden meaning of the poems of different fields. According to different fields of Emily Dickinson's poems, we divide the poems into three themes:death-themed poems, nature-theme poems, as well as love-themed poems. According to Labov's Narrative Structure and the generic structure explored in the first step, for Narrative poems, Complication, Resolution and Evaluation are the meaty parts. According to Li (2006), for Descriptive text, Particular part is indispensible. Under this circumstance, we will put focus on the analysis of these parts. However, as for the optional parts, we also should not overlook, as they can help us to understand more information of poem. In this thesis we are going to make the analysis by applying the theory of SFL, including Transitivity System and Theme-Rheme Structure, so that we can have a better understanding of the poems, and to have a better knowledge of Emily Dickinson herself. Besides, it also provides us with a new perspective to the understanding of other poems.