Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Visual Poetry

Visual poetry as a special type of poem produces visual impressions by means of text composition for the elaboration of poetic meanings. At present, researches on visual poetry have focused on traditional literary comprehension, but these researches have ignored aesthetic perception of visual poetry and ideographic functions of poetic patterns.Multimodal discourse analysis is primarily devoted to analyzing two or more modalities and making clear how they co-construct meanings. Domestic scholars have attempted to explain visual poetry based upon multimodal discourse analysis. But these researches are limited to comprehending and analyzing mono-modality without further explanations.Therefore, the thesis studies Chinese and English visual poetry on the basis of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. It analyzes how visual poetry constructs meanings as a multimodal discourse.The thesis exploits roles of integrated meaning with poetic layouts for thorough expressions of the motifs. It proves that multimodal discourse analysis has provided a new view and road for researches on visual poetry, further realized a stretching and deepened understandings in theoretical perspective; meanwhile other semiotics other than linguistic signs co-create meaning-making and it is feasible and practical to study visual poetry based on multimodal discourse analysis from the practical perspective.