Malashchuk-Vyshnevs'ka N. Poetics of Nonsense in Modern and Postmodern American Poetry: Stylistic, Linguististic and Cognitive Aspects

This thesis focuses on revealing stylistic devices and cognitive mechanisms which ensure the formation of specific verbal images and determine poetics of nonsense in modern and postmodern American poetry. Poetics of nonsense is defined as the unity of means and techniques as well as linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of creating novel and hiding conventional senses of a literary text, implied in image creative means in pre-conceptual, conceptual and verbal planes. The stylistic devices and cognitive mechanisms which ensure the formation of verbal images have been singled out. Thus catachresis is viewed as the central stylistic device of poetics of nonsense. Poetics of nonsense is actualized in modern poetic texts by means of synaesthetic mapping (direct and indirect) and contrastive mapping in its attributive, relational, situational, substitutional and narrative varieties.