A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and English Concrete Poetry Based on Cognitive Poetics and Multimodality - a Case Study of A War Sym-phony and l(a

摘要

Traditional approaches to interpret poetry have been poet-oriented, appearing alien to reader’s understanding and ap-preciation, which are generally insensitive to the aesthetic and emotional reflection during the process of analyzing poetry. This essay aims to combine cognitive poetics with multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to analyze concrete poems from readers’ angle. In this research, figure and ground, conceptual metaphor, and image schema of cognitive poetics are adopted to interpret A War Symphony and l(a from the perspective of visual modality and auditory modality. Meanwhile, the differences between Chi-nese and English concrete poetry in modality choosing and meaning conveying as well as the reasons are explored. This research reveals that readers are able to comprehend poetic meaning according to their life experiences. The multi-dimensional perspec-tive of visual and auditory modalities is conductive to exploring how readers challenge traditional reading mode to interpret poet-ic ideas. Meanwhile, three theories of cognitive poetics facilitate readers to perceive poetics effect with a cognitive mechanism. Therefore, all of these efforts are bound to arouse readers’interest in such a kind of anti-traditional poetry and broaden its popu-larity.