A Study Of Raymond Carver’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

As a short story writer and poet,Raymond Carver(1938-1988)is one of the most important American writers in the second half of the 20 th century.In his short life,Carver not only wrote a large number of short stories,but also wrote more than300 poems.Most of Carver’s poems were published as collections of poems before his death.The poems collection Fires,as an example,was published in1983.These poems include Winter Insomnia Which was published in1970 and Salmon Night Back Witch was published in 1976.Where Water Comes Together With Other Water was published in1985.Ultramarine was published in1986.Other poems were put together and published by his second wife Tess Gallagher,such as A New Path to the Waterfall was published in 1989.And the uncollected poems,Don’t Be A Hero,Please!,was published in 1991.Carver’s poetry provides an understated and controlled way of expressing what he wants to say,provides a space for the things and people closest to his heart to be put in place.As The Philadelphia Inquirer commented: “(Carver’s)best poems are like an epitome of his short stories,small heartbreaking scenes echoing narrative details......The emotional richness of his poetry is as much a part of his literary legacy as his incomparable novels.” However,the artistic uniqueness of Carver’s poetry has been covered by the achievement of his short stories and the glory of his work as a novelist.So,both in the United States and outside the United States,Carver’s literary contributions as a poet have not received enough attention.As an interdisciplinary humanistic theory,the cognitive poetics was proposed by Israeli scholar Reuven Tsur in the 1970 s.This theory became popular in the British and American academic circles at the end of the 20 th century.Cognitive poetics regards the study of literary reading as its main task.At the same time the theory focuses on the analysis of the major problems in literature research and tries to establish its own system of critical and literary theory.Professor Tsur regards that the poetic language of literature or literary criticism is both limited and influenced by human information processing process.Compared to traditional poetics,the cognitive poetics has fundamentally change.It no longer focus on the traditional Writers-Text-Readers triadic relation,but re-valuate the whole process of literary activities,especially paying attention to the readers in the process of cognitive experience in reading.By means of to analyze the literature,the cognitive poetics opens another window for literature research.Therefore,it is undoubtedly a beneficial attempt for this thesis to use the cognitive poetics theory to study Carver’s poetry.In this paper,the author mainly selects the image schema theory and the theory of prototypes which are key terms in the field of cognitive poetics to analyze Carver’s poetry.The paper mainly includes the following parts.The chapter one is the introduction,which mainly includes four aspects.In The first section,the paper introduces Carver’s life experience and poetry creation.In the second section,the paper summarizes and sorts out the literature on Carver at home and abroad and clarifies the necessity of studying Carver’s poetry.In the third section,the paper mainly introduces the development of cognitive poetics theory and the theories borrowed by this thesis.In The fourth section,the paper mainly starts from the particularity of Carver’s poetry and analyzes the possibility and feasibility of interpreting his poetry from the perspective of cognitive poetics.The chapter two is “Poetry as a Schema of Lives and Life”.In this chapter mainly uses the image schema theory to research the theme of Carver’s poetry.Carver’s poetry inherits the minimalist narrative style in his novel creation.The narrative creation mode has become the most prominent feature of Carver’s poetry,which makes Carver’s poetry have a strong narrative meaning.However,the image schema theory in the field of cognitive poetics,as one of the means of text analysis,is more inclined to the in-depth analysis of narrative texts.In This paper,the image schema theory is used to interpret four themes of Carver’s poems: the first section is Concerned With the Growth of One’s Life;the second section is Showing the Love and Suffering of the Individual;the third section is Reflecting the Blue-collar Life of the Bottom and the fourth section is Presenting the Western Style of America.The third chapter is The Pursuit of Poetic Art Against Modernism.In this chapter,this paper mainly uses the theory of prototype to study Carver’s three typical stylistic styles.In the field of cognitive poetics,the theory of prototype is more often used to study the typical characteristics of a writer’s literary works.Through the study and revelation of its typical characteristics,we can better understand the profound meaning of his works.Based on the research,three characteristics of Carver’s poems appear: the typical stylistic style of Minimalism narration,Iceberg principle and the Original ecology.