The Analysis Of Some Visual Poems In The Jakobsonian Parallel Principle

As a unique literary genre, visual poetry has attracted many scholars from all over the world to wave a thorough study on it. Currently, analyses and researches on visual poetry have been carried on in many disciplines and a variety of methods, for example, from the angle of literature, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics and discourse analysis all claim on the study. Admittedly, these studies enriched and extended the studying contents and scope of visual poetry. However, some of these studies still stay either on the surface, or one-side of visual poetry. In view of these problems, this thesis tries to look for other ways to analyze visual poetry in a new theoretical framework, hoping to enlighten the future studies.Roman Jakobson is not only a linguist, but also a critic of poetry. The theory of poetic function is the core of Jakobson’s poetic theory and the key of illustrating “literariness”. Poetry can be poetry just because the text was that property. Jakobson believes that the poetic function is displayed in parallel structure in poetic texts, and he elevated the parallel structure to the height of principle. The parallel principle is an important poetic issue, which not only concerns the form of language, but also has inner meaning. It is a predictable internal organization of poetic texts.Therefore, this thesis uses the parallel principle in Jakobson’s poetics to carry on a linguistic study on the form and meaning of visual poems. This thesis first introduces the research background, research objectives, significance, methodology and the basic organization of the thesis in the introduction part. Chapter two mainly explores the definition, types, aesthetic features and research status of visual poetry. Chapter three is devoted to the the theoretical basis of this thesis and described the operational mechanism and impact of poetic function around Jakobson’s poetics. Based on this, chapter four takes some visual poems as examples, trying to analyze the grammatical, semantic, phonetic, lexical and off-text parallelism in some visual poems with Jakobonian parallel principle.Through the researches on Jakobsonian parallel principle and the analyses on visual poetry with the parallel principle, the mysteries of visual poems are displayed to the readers and their understanding of the poems deepened, and therefore, Jakobson’s poetic parallelism is tested in a new literary genre.