Study On The Theory Of Michael Riffaterre’s Semiotics Of Poetry

The study on semiotics of poetry is not only an important means to explore the thinking and mode of poetry research,but also an important content to expand and verify the applicable scope of semiotics.Michael Riffaterre is a rare scholar who systematically explains the theory of semiotics of poetry.His theory has the characteristics of dialectical harmony between the text and the reader.This paper will introduce and analyze the key concepts and main viewpoints of the theory of Riffaterre’s semiotics of poetry,and evaluate the progress and limitations of his theory.The first chapter examines Riffaterre’s understanding of the concept of "semiosis of poetry" and his basic position.Riffaterre believes that the semiosis of poetry is manifested in two aspects: the hierarchical spanning of semantics and the continuous decoding of the text structure;needs two conditions : the feature of "equivalence" within the text and the reader’s ability to symbolize;experiences the following process:ungrammaticality appears and as the guideline guides the reader to read the second time.The second chapter examines Riffaterre’s discussion on the transfer of the meaning of poetry.Based on the knowledge background of lexicology,Riffaterre puts forward a new concept--hypogram as the intermediary of the transfer of the meaning of poetry,and analyzes the definition,type and intermediary function of hypogram.The third chapter examines Riffaterre’s discussion of textual derivation.Riffaterre proposes two variants of structure--matrix and model,using these two concepts and their interaction to ensure the invariability of text structure,and proposes the concept of expansion to to explain how the text is developed at the lexical level.The fourth chapter examines Riffaterre’s semiotic interpretation of the ambiguity of meaning in poetry.Riffaterre illustrates the ambiguity of meaning in poetry by adapting Peirce’s concept of interpretant,explains the various concrete ways in which ambiguity can be realized by combining the practice of poetic analysis,and explains the complex and changeable ambiguous phenomena uniformly by proposing the conflict and solution of various codes.