CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH POETIC DISCOURSE: A MULTIMODAL FORMAT

Abstract

The article focuses on outlining a multimodal format of contemporary English poetic discourse. It defines poetic discourse as a cognitive and speech activity, embracing the process and result – a poetic text (fragment of a poetic discourse), aimed at poetic communication between the addressor and the addressee. Such communication evolves at the intersection of different modes, namely verbal, visual, auditory and audiovisual. The modes are semiotic resources involved in construal of a variety of poetic forms in contemporary English poetic discourse. Visual, or graphic, elements participate in multimodal meaning making in poetic texts with illustrations. Auditory semiotic resources take part in the evolvement of a poetic discourse as an outcome of videogames or street noise’s acoustic environment and / or rhythm of present-day musical genres. Symbiosis of visual and auditory modes is manifested in screened or animated versions of poetic texts, as well as in poetic readings. The paper differentiates between digimodernist and metamodernist poetic discourse characterized by genre hybridity and paradoxicality. Digimodernist poetic discourse embodies digital text- and discourse construing based on “aesthetics” of intentional appropriation, plagiarism and copying by means of uncreative techniques “copy-paste” and “search-compile”. It presupposes involvement of digital technologies and unfolding in virtual space, i.e. Internet. Metamodernist poetic discourse evolves in constant mobility of literary forms, including poetic, between naïve modernist enthusiasm, striving for experiment and cynical postmodern irony actualized in pendulum-like oscillations of co-existing heterogeneous verbal and non-verbal poetic forms.