Poetic And Pictorial Language:Interpreting Wang Wei’s Poetry And Its English Versions From The Perspectives Of Multimodality And Cognitive Poetics

This thesis aims to combine cognitive poetics with MDA to analyze Wang Wei’spoetry. Traditional approaches to interpret poetry usually center on one or another aspectof literary text, such as rhythm, semantic features, and formal arrangement, etc. However,many previous studies offered by cognitive poetics have been writer-oriented, appearingalien to reader’s understanding and appreciation, which are generally insensitive to theaesthetic and emotional reflection during the process of analyzing poetry. Visual grammarin combination with cognitive poetics can be sufficiently illustrated to join from differentsources to broaden the poetry’s comprehension and appreciation.Wang Wei, a well-known traditional Chinese poet, exhibits imaginative and creativetalents in describing natural scenery and social reality. His style of writing poetry winshim honorable title of uniqueness, that is,“painting in poetry, poetry in painting.” Thethesis analyzes the nine different poetic themes from the aspect of cognitive multimodalapproach, including farewell poems, pastoral poems, reclusive poems, landscape poemsand homesick poems, etc. In the thesis, each selected poem is accompanied by one or twotraditional Chinese painting or paintings, symbolizing respective themes. The Englishversions of Wang Wei’s poems are collected from Xu Yuanchong and Witter Bynner’sworks for tentative analysis and comparison between original poetry and targeted Englishones.The thesis analyzes Wang Wei’s poetry from the perspective of cognitive multimodalapproach, focusing on the readers’ aesthetic feeling and emotion in the process of readingtexts. The research process is divided into four steps. The first step is following differenttheories and approaches provided by cognitive poetics and visual grammar, the authormakes a synthesis of the two theories which offer one plausible framework—cognitivemultimodal approach, to interpret this unique style of Chinese classical poetry, that is, thecombination of poetry and painting. The second step is to analyze the selected poetry fromthe aspect of cognitive multimodal approach, and analyze the poems from the perspectives of theme salience, schema classification, metaphoric attitude and blending analysis. Thenthe author makes an analysis of translations in English versions of the given poems fromthe perspective of cognitive poetics, with the aim to offer a comprehensive understandingof the poems. Finally, based on the previous analyses, the author makes discussionstowards the accessibility and comprehensionality of the proposed framework and providesevidences to verify the operative framework for future comprehension and appreciation ofthe poems. Different approaches can be applied to explain the same question, thus, thequestion can be analyzed maximized. The most important purpose is to combine theapproaches that seem irrelevant and give full play to their strengths.The common purpose of cognitive poetics and MDA is to present aesthetic emotionand readers’ feeling in reading poetry. Following the research theme of this thesis, readerswill be guided to step into the world of both poetry and paintings to enjoy and to proceedwith the beauty of poems. The thesis is a preliminary attempt to analyze and interpretWang Wei’s poetry based on the synthesized framework of cognitive poetics and MDA.Future directions of analysis can be made to cover more unique styles of Chinese poems toenrich and broaden territory of poetry as a whole.