Semiotic Study On Paroles Of Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert(1900-1977)was a French poet,playwright and lyricist of the twentieth century.In 1946,his first collection of poems-Paroles was published,and became a great success.Jacques Prévert has therefore become a name that we can never ignore when talking about the French literature.Most French people recited his poems during their childhood.Over the past century,this collection has been translated into more than ten languages.Since its publication,it has been sold millions of copies,which is a miracle in a time when the position of poetry is threatened.Afterwards,Prévert continued to publish more than ten collections of poems,and all these works were collected in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.It's very difficult to describe the poetic style of Jacques Prévert in a word,which is sometimes approachable,sometimes complex with surreal characteristics,sometimes unclassifiable with a mixture in forms and languages.It's also him who took the initiative of"flash" and "liste" poems.Due to the richness in content and the originality of the linguistic style of his poems,there are already abundant researches on his works abroad,most of which are in French.There is no lack of research on linguistic style,rhetorical devices,images and themes,etc.,yet most of these studies stop at a literal level without reaching the profound structure and meaning.In China there is little research on him,and for most Chinese,he is still a popular poet who describes people's daily life with simple everyday language.In this paper,we plan a structuralist study in order to reach the profound structure and meaning in the poems of Paroles.The Semiotics of Poetry of Michael Riffaterre,who is an influential French literary critic and theorist,offers a powerful methodological support for this study.Based on a textual analysis,this paper is divided into three chapters in a path of"literal decoding-structural decoding-meaning decoding" in reference to Riffaterre's method.The first chapter consists of the first decoding or literal decoding through an analysis of the signs in the work and their distribution.Firstly,the signs are classified in three categories:the natural signs,social signs,as well as verbal signs;secondly,as to the distribution,the poems of Jacques Prévert show a characteristic of" list" on the paradigmatic axis,as well as a narration feature on the syntagmatic axis.Through this level of decoding,we see that the poems in Paroles seem to be a mimesis of the reality on the literal level.The second chapter consists of the second decoding or the structural decoding through an analysis of the semiosis in order to clear off the connections between the signs with each other,which result in a profound and unified structure of the poems.Firstly,we intend to analyze the connections between the signs through a deduction of the production of the signs by using one of the key concepts in Riffaterre's theory-hypogram;secondly,the abstraction of the deep structure is realized through the deduction of production of the text by borrowing another key concept in Riffaterre's theory-matrix.Some opposition emerges from these analyses of the two levels,and theses oppositions lay the foundation for the interpretation of the profound meaning.The third chapter is a sublimation of the two previous chapters:the transition from the literal decoding to the structural decoding lies in that of the mimesis to the semiosis,and also in that from the literal meaning to the profound meaning.We call this transition the meaning decoding.Firstly,the signs represented in the literal decoding are recombined in the structural decoding by hypogrammatic derivation and the modulation of matrix.Thus a semantic indirection occurs,which is a prerequisite for the comprehension of the profound meaning.Secondly,the interpretation of the profound meaning is based on the opposition analyzed in the previous chapter,where we find a coexistence of melancholy and merriment in Prévert's expressions of emotions,and the former is due to a concern for the lives of all mankind and the latter means an optimism that Prévert exalted constantly.The originality of this paper is as follows:a more comprehensive study of Paroles,the analysis of the images in Jacques Prévert's poems from the semiotic perspective,as well as a summary of some characteristics of the poems.