Visual metaphors as a vector of the poetic text analysis
Digital technologies continue to change the modern human’s perception, especially intensively affecting the younger generation. The most serious manifestation of the ongoing processes was the cultural request for effects, not meanings, formed at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. In this regard, literature as an art that generates and conveys meanings is rapidly losing its relevance and value among young people. However, digital art, a modern computer graphic that fascinates the Internet users and especially adolescents with its emphasized effect, is quite capable of serving literature as a kind of guide to the word, as it contains a large number of metaphors that are “synonymous” to the poems included in the school literary education curriculum. This article is devoted to the search for new ways of “reading” and understanding texts through visual images. The purpose of the article is to consider the possibilities of using digital visual formats while teaching literature. The material used for the research is the work of designers and digital artists on the popular Internet photo hosting sites: visual metaphors. The main research methods are theoretical (analysis of philosophical, literary sources in accordance with the methodological setting of the study) and experimental (testing the developed educational material in literature lessons). When studying poetry, the article proposes to include in the content of the lessons the analysis of the artistic imagery of metaphors from the standpoint of literature and pictoriality as a new means of modern communication. The author describes in detail the example of the study of A.S. Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet” and an excerpt from V.V. Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in Trousers”, within the framework of which visual metaphors act as the vector of analysis, leading to a comparison of texts and design artwork, the identification of additional meanings that enrich the understanding of images, and a holistic interpretation of works.