A Figure-Ground Study Of E.E. Cummings' Poetry

Edward Estlin Cummings,widely known as e.e.cummings,has earned his reputation for the bold innovation in writing poetry,as in the experimentation with grammar and visual format on the page.Ranging from nature to love,from politics to humanity,from triviality to grandeur,and above all,Cummings wrote about the most authentic life in a tactful way.As one of the most avant-garde American poet in twentieth century,Cummings adopted and innovated multiple techniques and experiments in his poetry,as forging the format into a certain shape,along with abandoning the conventional grammar and even ignoring the rules of word formation.Behind the seemingly rambling and disordered forms,Cummings intended to express his lifelong pursuit of freedom and individuality,showing his idiosyncratic attitudes of the world,which had been both kind and cruel to him.The studies of Cummings in China can be derived from 1980s,which mainly focus on the bizarre and unique grammatical rules and unorthodox format via the theories of stylistics and linguistics.Yet few researches have been carried out on Cummings'poems from the perspective of figure-ground theories of cognitive poetics.The late twentieth century has witnessed the cognitive turn in literature criticism,which focuses on how the processing of information in human mind can influence and condition the language and form of poetry and elaborates the relation between the textual structure and the perceived effect of poetry.Pioneered by Reuven Tsur and Peter Stockwell,cognitive poetics has met its radical development in this century especially.It concerns on how the text and context can be linked through the cognitive process of readers.As a new way to think about literature,cognitive poetics encompasses various aspects as the theories of figures and grounds,prototypes,deixis,scripts and schemas,and so on.The cognitive poetics,being introduced into China in recent years,can be of great help for this thesis to interpret Cummings' poetry from a new perspective.As a result,this thesis adopts the principles in figure-ground theory from cognitive poetics to cast light on the mental process of Cummings' production of his poems.In this way this thesis can decode the way how the connections are presented between the idiosyncratic form,and the profound ideological implications of the poet.Chronically,this thesis will first deliver an introduction of E.E.Cummings' life and his poems as well as the research method and its value.Then it goes with a review of the studies on Cummings and his poems both abroad and domestically,along with the introduction of the theory of figure-ground from cognitive poetics that the thesis intends to conduct.In Chapter two,some distinctive devices of Cummings' poems shall be interpreted as figures via the employment of figure-ground theory,incorporating the misuse of words,eccentric layout and peculiar contents in his description to see the poet's rebellion of the tradition.Chapter three presents the emotional expression in Cummings' poems as grounds to get a clue of the representation of the poet's attitudes towards life,death and love.Through the transition of figures and grounds,Chapter four shall discuss about how the poet glorifies freedom and innocence and individuality and how he manages to combine the theme and form.Finally,Chapter five will draw a conclusion of the thesis with the view that Cummings has conceded his idiosyncratic attitudes towards life,death and love behind the bold innovation of the format and the defamiliarizing devices adopted.With the interpretation of the figure-ground theory,this thesis intends to present the profound thoughts and ideologies of Cummings in the connotations of his poems.