| Emily Dickinson is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant pearls in the 20~thh century American literature.However,she lived in solitude and obscurity when she was alive.It was not until 30 years after her death did this poet and her works been well known and appreciated by people.She abandoned all the sedentary happiness and chose poems as her only companion.Dickinson’s religious poetry is well-known for the novelty of words,anti-traditionality of mind and un-continuity of forms.She has created over 1700 poems with various themes and subjects,among which the poems about religion are most representative.This thesis aims to analyze the artistic features of Dickinson’s religious poetry with the theory of defamiliarization proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917.Defamiliarization,an artistic technique of presenting to audience common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar,corresponds perfectly with the novelty in Dickinson’s religious poetry.This thesis mainly adopts the religious poems as the research text to explore the inner world of the poet,to dig out the connotation behind the religious poems and to interpret and appreciate these religious poems from the new angel of defamiliarization.Dickinson’s rebellious attitude towards religion and God has long been the research priority for critics.Readers can get a clue from the unconventionality of the forms and contents of her religious poems.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter gives an introduction of Emily Dickinson’s whole life and the publication of her works,explores the influence sources of her distinctive writing style,summarizes the research findings of her works made by the scholars throughout the world.It then represents the theory of defamiliarization,pointing out the possibility and significance of applying this theory in analyzing Dickinson’s religious poetry.The second chapter discloses the defamiliarization of punctuations in Dickinson’s religious poetry,aiming to explore this distinctive style and the underlying reason behind by examining specific religious poems.The third chapter mainly discusses the defamiliarization of sentence structure in Dickinson’s religious poetry.In her poems,not only the essence of classic writers can be traced but a tint of modernism is also revealed.She breaks through the grammatical norms with great boldness,expressing ideas and emotions by ungrammatical sentences.All these forms give readers a new and fresh reading experiences.The fourth chapter describes the defamiliarization of religious images in Dickinson’s poetry.Though Dickinson never joins in the Christian,she is familiar with both the Bible and all the religious rites due to her living background.As a result,she can merge religion themes deftly into poetry creating.But under her pen,God and heaven usually emerge in defamiliarized appearances that people are unfamiliar with,which motivates readers to reflect on her true attitude towards religion.The fifth chapter is the conclusion part of this thesis.It makes a summary of all the defamiliarization features and their underlying forming reasons.Based on that,Dickinson’s complex attitude toward religion and her unique understanding of God and heaven are fully displayed.Also,an all-round evaluation of the artistic features in the perspective of defamiliarization is made in the last chapter. |
