A Functional Analysis Of Concrete Poetry In Visual Surroundings

As a new type of poetry, concrete poetry is a hybrid of linguistic signs, visual arts and modern technology, presenting the common features of traditional poetry and the prominent characteristics in terms of visual arts and technology. Therefore, concrete poetry can be seen as a fresh genre which melts into the linguistic signs, image, colors, and typography. Concrete poetry can only be powerful on the basis of the meanings of linguistic signs if these non-linguistic elements are taken into account, thus making it abstract, symbolic and expressive.However, the expressiveness and visional dependence seem to be the two sides of a coin. Some critics are in disfavor of concrete poetry as they are drawn to the criticism of the participation of the visual elements. As far as they are concerned, the aesthetic mood of the concrete poems is in jeopardy and is lacking imaginary powers, thus degrading the new poetry. As a matter of fact, they apply the traditional rules to evaluating concrete poetry, taking no notice of cultural meanings of these non-linguistic elements, let alone justifying concrete poetry in literature. Meanwhile, concrete poetry is analyzed on the basis of stylistics, which focuses on the graphological deviance of the visual elements, thus revealing the diversity of its expressiveness. Yet, no proper answers are offered to the question of how such graphological deviance conveys cultural meanings in a concrete poem. By comparison, more progress has been made in terms of linguistic approach to concrete poetry. In the progress, Halliday's systemic functional grammar is applied to the three meta-functions of these visual elements. Likewise, iconicity of image is analyzed in terms of cognitive mechanism. But the expressive methods and their cultural meanings are not clarified in a systematic way.As a result of the emergence of concrete poems with visual arts, it is necessary to take into account the visual elements such as fine art and design engineering. So an objective criticism on concrete poetry will be possible when literature and linguistics are both considered. Since the term discourse analysis was suggested by Harris in the 1950s, great efforts have been made to discuss such non-linguistic elements as image, color, and etc. So the theory of multimodal discourse analysis has risen in the 1990s accordingly, contributing a theoretical framework to the discourse analysis in visual communication. So an attempt will be made to discuss the multimodal and meanings of the image, color, typography in concrete poetry on the basis of linguistics in the present thesis. Meanwhile, some regulations concerning the creation as well as comprehension will be discussed in the present study, so that some analytical modes can be available in the subsequent study.