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Deframing Theory & Poetry: from William Shakespeare to E. E. Cummings

Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman, Minia University, yass712000@yahoo.com

Abstract
This paper introduces the theory of deframing: a new mechanism for reading and analyzing poetry. This theory is derived from the cinematic term dcadrage; from photography, painting and cognitive frames. It aims at unraveling cultural specifics which affect a (foreign) readers interpretation of a given literary work. Moreover, it introduces different possible readings and interpretations by spotlighting the less focused scenes /details in a given work. Deframing necessitates decoding of intertextual and cognitive references, which helps build an accurate, deeply rooted cultural image without discarding any cultural implications. On the other hand, it synchronically and diachronically delimits a certain scene at a definite moment, changing any given interpretation or an expected response. Actually, it provides the reader with possibilities to revisit a work of art and discover new meanings and produces different interpretations. The theory will be applied to different poets from William Shakespeare to E. E. Cummings.
Keywords: Deframing, poetry, literature, painting, photography, cinema, cognitive linguistics
Published by World Acdemia Org Publication . UK , London

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1. Introduction
The selected poems analysed below show that the theory of deframing can be applied to poetry and further to literature. The chosen poems had been written within four hundred years, starting from William Shakespeare and ending with E. E. Cummings. Each poem highlights different element of the theory; other elements may be in the background, though. Each of the three bases of the theory, viz., photography/ painting, cinema making and cognitive linguistics, provides an approach to deframe relevant frames. Put together, they form an inseparable whole. Though frames used by the three bases seem different, they share the same deframing technique which produces new meanings.

2. Deframing in Photography/Painting
Deframing reminds one of the relation between poetry and painting/ photography, which suggests that a framed meaning is a reflection of the original meaning in nature. Therefore, to complete this framed meaning, it needs to be deframed. What the painter observes in nature and vicissitude of peoples lives is both mirrored in his mind and reflected in his paintings, per se. The same can be said about the poet whose poetry expresses what his eyes behold. M. H. Abrams shows the relationship between painting, photography and poetry:

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Before the invention of photography the product of a painter was the best available instance of something which captures and retains a likeliness. A picture, therefore, while itself a work of art, was a useful adjunct to the mirror for clarifying the less obvious mimetic quality of an art like poetry, which reflects the visible world indirectly, by the significance of its words (33). Then Abrams proceeds to stress the reflective nature of poetry through its relationship to painting: "[] the appeal to painting corroborated the concept that poetry is a reflection of objects and events" (34). A reflection is a framed view, an incomplete meaning that needs to be deframed by a reader to reach a state of integrity. Framing is deeply related to the authority a photographer exercises over a picture. Therefore, a photographer finds it difficult to apply deframing in order not to lose his control over the picture. Similarly, in Daffodils William Wordsworth portrays the natural scenery from his own perspective. He is personified as a cloud and depicts what he sees while wandering. I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze (Wordsworth 219). The portrayal of the daffodils fluttering and dancing highlights the temporal framecrystalized by the time phrase all at once- that cuts part of the flowing scene. This framed scene is deframable since the daffodils are too many to be counted as if it was a painting/ photograph with unframed edges. Again in painting, deframing helps create new effects. The complicated nature of intersected frames is unraveled and deframed in order to spotlight a hidden meaning in a work of art or a dimly-lighted corner in a picture: The frame or the pictures edge is, in the first place, the external envelope of a series of frames or sections that join up by carrying out counterpoints of lines and colors, by determining compounds of sensations. But the picture is also traversed by a deframing power that pens it onto a plane of composition or an infinite field of forces [] The painters action never stays within the frame; it leaves the frame and does not begin with it. Literature, and especially the novel, seems to be in the same situation. (Deleuze and Guattari 187-8)

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Novels such as The Trial illustrate the interconnectedness of frames and highlight the deframing power that traverses them. The opening lines of the novel leave the scene incomplete since Joseph K is going to suffer because of an unknown person: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested (Kafka 17). Kafka stresses the function outside the present frame. His drawings, the old men and the silhouettes that he liked to draw, emphasize figures with bent heads, straightened heads, and head over heels (Deleuze and Guattari 7) The relationship between deframing and photography shows forms of decomposition. Eileraas hints at the deframing effects that exist within the photographic field. As she assesses war time identity card portraits composed by the French photographer Marc Garanger, she finds out that his work yields fertile ground for debate regarding how colonial fantasies of otherness are photographically conceived, and how their orchestration depends upon a certain ambivalence that might permit creative forms of decomposition from within the photographic field (Eileraas 810). Parallax is a deframing tool that works within the photograph, but at the same time, it ignores existing frames since they are composed by the viewer and the object being photographed. In the second stanza of the Daffodils, the poet is liable to misrecognize a scene of ten thousand dancing daffodils, viewed from his angle. Similarly, the movement of the daffodils can contribute to such misrecognition. Again in The Trial, the informers identity is viewed differently by each reader. Joseph K is constantly seen from different angles. In Heart of Darkness, minute details of chained black people portray slavish characteristics, giving no head to their identities. To a similar effect, Eileraas maintains: Due to the parallax that typically accompanies photographic inscription,I will conceive of misrecognition as a complex response to the nationalist and colonialist politics of representation. By subversively engaging with parallax, post colonial writers creatively decompose seemingly fixed identities (Eileraas 811). Misrecognition plays the same role as deframing since both of them show an unshaped identity which is neither fixed nor fractured. The deframing power can show itself in multiple gazes. A photograph can be understood through a nexus of gazes: that of the photographed object, the photographers and the viewers. Distance and obliquity play an important role in getting the spectator involved in the interior of the painting. Seen from a short distance and from an oblique point of view, the painting attracts the spectator who discovers so much that he is forced to believe that the scene extends beyond the boundaries of the frame, holding him in this space as well as pushing him beyond it, which multiplies the power of the representation to evoke in it the unrepresented, if not the unrepresentable, and opens up an unlimited space to

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him (Deleuze and Guattari 198). Similarly, when read closely, a poem gets the reader involved and he feels his responsibility and does his own reading and provides his interpretation. The inward eye in the last stanza of Wordsworths poem illustrates the concept of the poem as a series of photographs recollected, as if they were scenes in a movie. An interpretation can be of a photographic or a cinematographic nature. The difference between cinematographic image and photographic one is that the former is of mobile nature while the latters immobile: Epstein comes closest to the concept of the shot: it is a mobile section, that is a temporal perspective or a modulationPhotography is a kind of moulding: the mould organizes the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium at a certain instant (immobile section). However, modulation does not stop when equilibrium is reached, and constantly modifies the mould, constitutes a variable, continuous temporal mould. This is the movement-image that Bazin contrasts from this point of view with the photo (Deleuze 24). Both cinematographic and photographic features are found in a poetic image. The more serious a reading is done, the clearer the features appear.

3. Deframing in Cinema Making

Pascal Bonitzer and Gilles Deleuze are basic to the theory of cultural deframing of texts. Deframing was introduced in film studies by Bonitzer, but was elaborated by Deleuze. (Sevin 4-5).In film-making framing a picture limits the flow of meaning and cuts parts of reality, sometimes essential. The technique of using unframed pictures used by Vander Keuken is meant to defy what harmful arrogance against the world a frame may embody. It aims at keeping the dimension of innocence an eye can enjoy when a picture is seen in a limitless space an unframed expansion. This technique keeps reality as it is, exposed to the fullest, to the eye of the beholder: Vander Keukens deframing technique is a relativization made visible of the act of framing, which reveals the fragility at the arbitrariness of this act and the humility of his decision faced with the sovereignty of the world, rather than a new act of framing which would simply re-affirm, at the same level, the feeling of authority with which the filmmaker imposes his will on the visible world. (Bergala) The idea of a continuum of deframing is sometimes meant to stress dilemma and restlessness. For example, the main character of In the City of Sylvia, a film directed by Jose Luis Guerin, is thrown into a delirium, a seemingly endless wave of distraction where his eyes move from a face to another. This constant refocusing, reframing of attention distinguishes In the City of Sylvia as a unique species of

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contemplative cinema with Attention Deficit Disorder (Radical Closure). Finally he is lost in distraction since he distracts himself away from his first desire, viz., to reunite with Sylvia, a girl whom he met at the same city years ago. The same applies to The Search, a novel by Naguib Mahfouz, which was filmed long ago. Saber, the protagonist, went in a futile search of his unknown father who represents the only proof of Sabers identity. Finally, different frames were mixed and he was distracted. A frame is a limited space, be it conceptual, physical or figurative. Even a work is framed into certain readings. With a certain work of art a frame which locates a definite meaning may be connected to other frames through intertextual references so much so one can find difficulty in pinpointing limits of individual frames. It is more or less similar to optical illusion. In film making, theories of suture and deframing help visualize the movement from framing to deframing. The theories of suture and deframing illustrate a general lesson about theories of framing. Each theory of framing is an attempt to describe in the broadest sense how the mind handles discontinuitya perceived break, difference or caesura (Branigan 143). In The Search different sets of frames cross each other, illustrating the theories of suture and deframing at the same time. A set of frames that crystallizes Sabers early life emerges by virtue of the flashback technique only to be discontinued by another portraying his current situation. In cinema making, the term framing appeared in 1923, when different experiments of editing and moving shots in cinema, as well as snapshot photography were rapidly becoming widespread (Bonitzer, 163 qtd in Sevin 15). Similar to what happens in the cinema, intertextual references in a literary work are off-screen; and fictional characters do not have the same chance as characters in a film. In other words, they do not come on-screen within the present frame of the work. As painting and poetry was once claimed to be similar, painting and the cinema share the similarity of an off-screen frame which, in painting, calls upon imagination to frame what is behind the present frame. Deframing is a process that involves something quite different from the oblique view of classical painting [] Deframing is a less widespread effect, in spite of movement of the camera. But if deframing is examplary cinematic effect, it is precisely because of movement and the diachronic progress of the films images, which allow for its absorption into the film as much as for the deployment of its emptiness effect (Bonitzer 198-9). In a poem, the off-screen frame is deframed by unraveling intertextual references and deframing the text. For example, Langston Hughes Harlem revolves around a dream deferred, the identity of which cannot be discovered until a reader figures out the intertextual reference to the aborted African American dream. In his definition of framing, Deleuze gives a physical image of a frame-closed space which the image, with all relative minutes, sets, characters and props, occupies. Within a frame a set of sub frames can be seen. The extensive and

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intensive nature of a frame closely relates it to two concepts: saturation and rarefaction. That is why, in case of saturation, one frame can support two scenes at the same time: one playing in the foreground and the other in the background. In rarefaction, on the other hand, a single object is stressed and subsets do not exist. Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is a good example of saturation, which is similar in its deframing function to windowing, a cognitive linguistic term that refers to the foreground and the background. A frame may sometimes be seen as geometric and physical as it refers to a spatial composition that preexists and therefore encompasses and limits the body framed. However, a frame can be seen as dynamic in nature so much so it corresponds to the powers of its contents: images, scenes, characters and other objects. The iris method in Griffith, which isolates a face first of all, then opens and shows the surroundings; Eisensteins researches inspired by Japanese drawings, which adapt the frame to the theme; Gances variable screen which opens and closes according to the dramatic necessities, and like a visual accordion from the very beginning attempts were made to test dynamic variations of the frame (Deleuze 13). Not only does the concept of framing refer to visible functions but it also indicates that more functions are yet to be read and deciphered: Bonitzer has constructed the interesting concept of deframing [dcadrage] in order to designate its abnormal points of view which are not the same as an oblique perspective or a paradoxical angle, and refer to another dimension of the image. We find examples of this in Dreyers cutting frames; faces cut by the edge of the screen in The Passion of Joan of Arc[] or in Bresson, whose parts are not connected and are beyond all narrative or more generally pragmatic justification, perhaps tending to confirm that the visual image has a legible function beyond its visible function (Deleuze 15) Shakespeares sonnet xviii can be read in light of legible as well as visible functions. It revolves around the concept of beauty which is compared through different frames to other things, and is related to an out-of-field, to beauty in nature and the metaphysical concept of beauty. The beauty is crystallized through different shots/frames: summers day, winds, buds of May. Then the out-of-field comes through the image of the eternal summer, eternal lines and mens breath, a life giving force. The sonnet celebrates the love between the poet and the young man to whom the poem is addressed. It shows how verse is powerfully descriptive of the young mans beauty which is compared to all beautiful things in nature.

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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; (Shakespeare 11). The out-of-field, this thing/object that has a strong visible effect, is what is yet to be discovered about a deframing act or a deframed image. The out-of-field refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present. This presence is indeed a problem and itself refers to two new conceptions of framing. If we return to Bazins alternative of mask or frame, we see that sometimes the frame works like a mobile mask according to which every set is extended into a larger homogeneous set with which it communicates, and sometimes it works as a pictorial frame which isolates a system and neutralizes its environment [] All framing determines an out-offield. There are not two types of frame only one of which would refer to the out-of-field; there are rather two very different aspects of the out-of-field, each of which refers to a mode of framing (Deleuze16). This corresponds to two modes of framing while reading literature: exclusive and inclusive. The former is a closed up system that sets the out-of-field (in this case intertextual reference, allusions and context in general) apart from the image. It deframes an already existing textual/contextual nexus for the sake of close reading. If this mode is applied, the poem can read as a man-woman expression of love. The latter, on the contrary, deframes the visibly limited image and revives long standing intertextual/contextual relations. Therefore, the poem receives another interpretation. The fact that a set which is related to another invisible one, which is called the out-offield, gives rise to the out-of-field once framed necessitates the existence of another out-of-field. The set of all these sets forms a homogeneous continuity, a universe or a plane [plan] of genuinely unlimited content (Deleuze 16). The concept of beauty framed in the poem is yet related to an out-of-field, to eternal beauty. The whole passes through closed sets forming a binding thread. On the other hand, the sets extend into each other. This, ultimately, forms one integrated whole which is open to infinity. Two aspects are qualitatively relevant to the out-of-field: a relative aspect by means of which a closed system refers in space to a set which is not seen, and which can in turn be seen, even if this gives rise to a new unseen set, on to infinity; and an absolute aspect by which the closed system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the invisible. Deframings [dcadrages]which are not

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pragmatically justified refer to precisely the second aspect as their raison dtre (Deleuze 17). The out-of-field refers to both intertextual and metatextual references which both constitute the context of the image/text. The two sets of references intermingle. However, one emerges over the other when it comes to a closed text. The emergence of either reference depends on how strong a relation the present text has with other unseen/absent texts. On the one hand, the metatext has a strong presence in case of a weak relation with the unseen out-of-field. However, when intertextual references have the upper hand, the text is open to different possibilities. Thus, two kinds of relations a text can have: actual relations with other texts, intertextuality, and virtual relations with literature/ universe. The second set of relations is achieved indirectly through the extension of the first which is directly achieved by limitation of the second, and in the text itself. The shot to a film is as a readers response/authors craft to a text, and a montage to a film is as a series of interpretations to a text. The readers response goes between the text and the series of interpretations in order to hold relations between both. In so doing the frame may be expanded, deframed and reframed. Similar to this is the relation between the shot (readers response), the framing of a set (part of a text) and the montage (the series of overlapping interpretations). In fact, the movement in cinema making has inspired many authors literary works: Orson Welles often describes two movements which are formed, one of which is like a horizontal linear flight in a kind of elongated, striated cage, lattice-worked, and the other a circular sweep whose vertical axis performs a high or a low angle shot from a height: these movements are those which had already inspired Kafkas literary work and can infer that Welles has an affinity with Kafka which goes beyond the film of The Trial (Deleuze 21). The movement is essential in film making since it relates the parts of a set within the same frame or a set to another one, in an act of deframing. Likewise, the movement relates different parts of an image in a literary work or different images, deframing them into one whole or connecting them to an out-of-field set of images, intertextually and metatextually. Moreover, the shot in cinema making has a similar relation to deframing as the scene/image to literary works. In the framing are the different moments of shooting; the taking of one shot is the framing, the shooting of another shot is the deframing of one shot in relation to the framing of the following one, and the montage is the final reframing [] Framing is no longer defining a space, but imprinting a time (Deleuze 319). Deframing can be said to be a deviant frame that has an impact on cinema, painting and photography:

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Deframing is a perversion, one that adds an ironic touch to the function of cinema, painting, even photography, all of them forms of exercising the right to look. In Deleuzian terms it needs to be said that the art of deframing, the displaced angle, the radical off-centredness of a point of view that mutilates the body and expels it beyond the frame to focus instead on dead, empty zones barren of dcor, is ironically sadistic. (Bonitzer 200)

4. Deframing in Cognitive Linguistics

In cognitive linguistics the concept of framing/deframing plays the same function as those derived from painting/photography and cinema. The unframed picture in photography and the out-of-field frame in cinema making are echoed in the idea of a meta-concept in cognitive linguistics. A frame controls different ways of interpretation since it is a meta-concept that governs many other concepts: However, since interpretation always involves concepts, one can argue that frames as keys to interpretation are at least meta-concepts: concepts that regulate the application of other concepts []a frame is, as a rule, designated by a single term and as such corresponds to one metaconcept but usually governs a plurality of sub-concepts and expectations (Wolf 3-4). Interpretations are sometimes culturally and historically bound. When frames as meta-concepts are applied, interpretations show flexibility towards different cultural and historical situations that have been deframed. According to Wolf, framings are interpretative codes since they have an interpretative guiding and controlling function with reference to it [the framed situation or phenomenon] (6). According to cognitive semanticists, conceptual structure is embodied and constant with what we experience from the external world. On this experience is built the nature of conceptual organization from which stems the idea of containment which is a meaningful consequence of a particular type of physical relationship that we have experienced in interaction with the external world (Evans and Green158). The consequence is framed/contained in this conceptual organization. Such framing or containment is essential to an image schema that shows meaningful concepts. The concept container is based on the direct embodied experience of interaction with the external world (Evans and Green158). Cognitive semantics illustrates the idea of deframing through its view of meaning as encyclopedic, as meaning construction is prompted by the conventional meaning of a given word. Meaning construction, which is equated with conceptualization, draws upon encyclopedic knowledge[] and involves inferencing strategies that relate to different aspects of conceptual structure, organization and packaging (Evans and Green162). Some kinds of mappings use frames. There are three kinds of mappings: projection mappings, pragmatic function mappings and

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schema mappings. Pragmatic function mappings are established between two entities by virtue of a share frame of experience (Evans and Green167). Metonymy is an example of this kind of mapping which occurs during the process of meaning construction as mental spaces. These spaces are connected information packets. These series of connections depend on framing and deframing being two concepts going on a constant flux. In Robert Frosts Fire and Ice the two concepts of fire and ice refer to the end of the world since a share frame of destruction is formed during the process of meaning construction by virtue of information packets that take place in the readers mind during the process of reading. Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice (Frost 220). Meaning is formed by the accumulation and interconnectedness of information packets which in turn form mental spaces. Through mapping, the two contrasting concepts of fire and ice finally form a general concept/frame of destruction. Function pragmatic mappings is also illustrated by the metonymy, in Shakespeares sonnet, nor lose possession of that fair thou owest which means that of the young mans beauty nothing will be lost. The last two lines show the essential concept/frame of beauty whose subsets are ever deframed through and by mens eyes and the ever changing course of life. A frame is limited and deframing holds virtual relations with parts of the text. A body of the text is an inseparable whole which is focused on through framing as it proves the impossibility of fully understanding and visualizing this text without being deframed. Consequently, the concept of beauty in the sonnet is seen from different angles. This deconstructive feature is central to the process of deframing. Ayda Sevin, talking about the similarity in function between deconstruction and deframing, says: Like deconstruction, deframing emphasizes that what is invisible, hidden, or lacking is actually a possibility, veiled by the granted centering of the frame (33). Cognitive psychology and conceptual blending affect the deframing process. According to cognitive psychology, knowledge representation has been modeled in terms of frames. Lawrence Barsalou sees frames as complex conceptual structures used to represent all types of categories [] According to this view, frames are the basic mode of knowledge representation. They are continually updated and modified due to ongoing human experience, and are used in reasoning in order to generate new references (Evans and Green223). Therefore, frames undergo a constant process of deframing, reframing and postframing.

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When a counterfactual scenario emerges from two reality spaces, a blend space, that combines the other two, shows a new meaning as if it deframes the already given meaning. The blend space, then, given rise to a new meaning albeit counterfactual, which is not available from encyclopedic knowledge (Evans and Green163). In fact, conceptual blending theory deframes, for example, two categories and selectively integrates aspects of each of the source categories in order to produce a new category with its own distinct internal structure (Evans and Green 400). This is what happens when the two factual frames of Fire and Ice are deframed. A new blend highlights the best way the poet sees for world destruction. A frame/category is deframed when a suggestive frame emerges in the mind of the reader. Through the integration of the real and suggestive frames, a new frame appears. Similar to a frame, a blend can be used for a reblending and postblending, as it is common, and indeed the norm, for blends to function as inputs for further blending and reblending (Evans and Green 431). Factual-counterfactual interrelationship, which is known as factuality event frame, shows a pair of counterpart factual-counterfactual construction types, the highlighting of one of which is known as factuality windowing. When the two alternatives are there, one is windowed and the other stays in the background to act as a foil for comparison (Talmy 291). This is known as a comparison frame. The figure-ground interrelationship is reflected in the relationship between the frame and its content. The figure-ground conceptual entity expresses motion event frame and introduces figure-ground windowing, where attention is shared by figure and ground alternatively. The figure is a moving or conceptually movable entity within the scene whose site, path, or orientation is conceived of as a variable of which the particular value is the relevant issue and that is characterized with respect to the Ground. The Ground is a stationary reference entity within the scene with respect to which the Figures site, path, or orientation is characterized (Talmy 298). This comparison frame is applied to E.E. Cummings What if a much of a which of a wind, while the interpretation of Wallace Stevens A Dish of Peaches in Russia and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is based on the figure-ground relationship. The comparison frame in What if a much of a which of a wind is based on contrast which alternately stresses the factual and counterfactual frames: the real world and what is harbingered. what of a much if a which of a wind gives the truth to summers lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? Blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)

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--when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man (Cummings 91). A breathtaking comparison is held between a world at peace and one which is being destroyed by man. The two frames intersect each other to the extent that factuality windowing is not easily crystallized. The comparison that illustrates the destruction of the world goes on in stanzas two and three. The wind will Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind / (blow pity to envy and soul to mind) (Cummings 91). The third and last stanza carries a bad omen as the universe is blown into two by mysterious powers that will Blow soon to never and never to twice / (blow life to isnt; blow death to was) (Cummings 91). The comparison frame is complete with dividing people into killers and victims: the most we die; the more we live (Cummings 91). The process of windowing is similar to the idea of applying dcadrage to two frames within the same cadre. One frame, which has the foreground portion of information, is highlighted/windowed, while the other is backgrounded or gapped. The cognitive process at work here is called the windowing of attention, the coherent referent situation with respect to which the windowing must take place is an event frame, the portions that are foregrounded by inclusion are windowed, and the portions that are backgrounded by exclusion are gapped (Talmy 257). The connection between the event frame and the one overshadowed and backgrounded is inferred by the reader. Although only a certain portion or portions of the referent scene are explicitly specified when thus windowed, it is understood as part of the nature of the windowing process thatgiven the appropriate contextthe addressee will be able to infer the reminder of the scene (Talmy 258). Through conceptual alternativity (Talmy 258), a reader can focus on window/frame part of the scene in different ways. The process of windowing can focus on the initial, medial or final part of the scene. However, some portions are out of frame/gapped since they lack reference. This is called initial, medial, or final gapping (Talmy 259). Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird illustrates windowing and gapping. Each time the blackbird takes a new form, or is framed differently, the previous interpretation goes in the background. Seen together, the thirteen frames constitute one big frame which is connected to a wider one. Conceptual alternativity shows at its best in this poem. Each way of the thirteen shows the free play between the frame and its parts (Aman 278). Moreover, the thirteen ways, which form the whole frame of the poem, are in constant play. The ways show the things themselves and sometimes refer to an out-of-field relationship to a wider frame. Therefore, deframing occurs each time a reader gives his own interpretation. The very title suggests a deframing-based reading. Since the tool of signification is not stable, the object of the frame and the parts constituting it keep changing from one stanza to the other. Moreover, being of an unidentified nature, the blackbird suggests an endless series of frames. The first stanza shows the bird as a moving eye: Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird (Stevens 92). The concept of encompassing twenty mountains and a moving eye in cadre is practically impossible; so each reader will have a partially different view of the scene, where

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part of the frame is windowed and the others are gapped. As a result, different interpretations will follow. For the process of windowing to be practical, two kinds of material should be distinguished: core material and incidental one: Serving such a function, something like the following consideration is needed: Arising from whatever causes, whether in part innately universal ones or in part linguistically or culturally specific ones, language users apparently tend to conceive certain elements and their interrelations as belonging together as the central identifying core of a particular event or event type. Other elements, ones that on other grounds might have seemed to share an equally intimate involvement in the event, are instead conceptualized as peripheral or incidental (Talmy 259). The second stanza of Stevens poem shows three states of mind representing three blackbirds. One state constitutes the core material of the frame and, therefore, is windowed and the others are incidental and gapped. Stanza three shows the intersection of a smaller frame with a wider one, the image of a blackbird with an autumn : The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. / It was a small part of the pantomime (Stevens 93). The first and third stanzas represent the moving parts in the frame, while the second deframes this movement. The reader is at a loss and cannot decide which is encompassing the other: the twenty mountains or the eye? Even the tree with the three birds cannot be decided whether it is windowed or gapped. In stanza four the concept of the blackbird is deframed and intersected with other human frames: A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. (Stevens 93) The interconnectedness between frames suggests the windowing of a common quality rather than physical entity. A man and a woman can be as quick-witted as a bird, but the latter cannot take the formers physical appearance. The blackbirds both whistling in stanza five and its involvement in the poets noble accents and inescapable rhythms in stanza eight; and his shadow crossing the snowy scene in stanza six, and walking around womens feet in stanza seven, window the unseen part of the frame. Disjointedness suggested by the echo of whistling and the unclear features of a shadow stresses the importance of gapped parts of a frame. Again stanza nine recalls the idea of the relationship of a smaller frame and a different wider one: When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles (Stevens 93). The circles are indefinite; therefore, different interpretations can suggest the interconnectedness of these circles with many

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Modern Journal Of Language and Literature , Vol. 1 , No. 2 /3 , October /November 2011 ISSN : 2251- 6956 Word Academia Org. Publication, UK. London
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frames. While stanza ten shows the blackbird as a concept crossing frames of thought, flying in a green light (Stevens 93), the hidden potentialities, the shadowy and gapped parts, are brought into light in stanza eleven. Mans fears are so crystallized that they are mistaken for a blackbirds shadow. Stanza twelve stresses and windows the moving parts of the wider frame, The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying (Stevens 93). The last stanza completes the frame since The blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs (Stevens 93). Eventually, the object of the frame, the blackbird, rests, waiting for other interpretations to come. According to a semantic frame theory, a lexical item has a particular meaning but, at the same time, it is related to a wider frame where it is associated with other meanings: The specific meaning designated by a lexical item is represented by the figure, and is a salient subpart of a larger frame, which represents the ground relative to which the figure understood. Frames thus represent a complex knowledge structure that allows us to understand, for example, a group of related words and that also plays a role in licensing their grammatical behavior in sentences (Evans and Green 222). In A Dish of peaches in Russia (Stevens 224) though the dish and peaches have specific meanings, they are connected to other wider semantic frames. The frame plays an important role in decoding a given situation. It decodes a culturally loaded scene by relating deframed associated elements and entities. The frame relates the elements and entities associated with a particular culturally embedded scene from human experience (Evans and Green 222). The poem stresses the possibility of seeing three intersected frames within one frame. The idea of alternativity is semantically based. The first frame a readers mind captures is of a dish with some peaches which the poet enjoys eating in Ruissa. However, other lexical meanings suggest alternative frames. First, the peaches can be construed as some intellectuals, in Russia or at the poets homeland, whose company he enjoys. Second, if the word dish denotes a sexually attractive woman, peaches will be interpreted as the beautiful features the poet portrays.

5. Conclusion
Painting/photography illustrates the idea of a framed meaning that is supposed to be complete through deframing. Cinema making sees that a frame is not complete until it intersects with other frames. Such an intersection culminates into a wider frame. Cognitive linguistics stresses the relations between frames that are windowed and gapped, yielding an interpretation and overshadowing another. In fact, deframing in painting/photography, cinema making and cognitive linguistics aims at introducing new points of focus and expressing a different interpretation each time a text is read by the same reader or by different readers.

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Modern Journal Of Language and Literature , Vol. 1 , No. 2 /3 , October /November 2011 ISSN : 2251- 6956 Word Academia Org. Publication, UK. London
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The above discussion and analysis of the poems and novels illustrate the fact that deframing can function as a suitable reading mechanism of literature. Meaning is constructed and reconstructed by introducing alternative points of focus. Photography/painting, cinema making and cognitive linguistics form a hybrid concept/frame on which the theory of deframing is based. The concept of the out-offield connects the elements of the theory since any frame relates to a wider out-offield one, and is thus deframed.

References
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Evans, Vyvyan and Melaine Green. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Frost, Robert. (1979). The poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected poems, Complete and Unabridged. Ed. Edward Connery Latham . New York: Holt Paperback. Kafka, Franz. (1998). The Trial: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text. Trans. Breon Mitchell. Schocken Books Inc. Radical Closure .Blogspot Framing, reframing, deframing In the City of Sylvia. http://radicalclosure.blogspot.com/2008/02/framing-reframing-deframing-incity of.html. (Accessed on 5 Feb., 2011). Sevin, Ayda. (2007). Margins of the Image: Framing and Deframing in the Graphic Novel and the Film V for Vendetta. MA Thesis. Bilkent University: Institute of Fine Arts. Shakespeare, William. (1957). Love Poems and Sonnets of William Shakespeare: With Classic Silhouette Illustrations. New York: Doubleday. Stevens, Wallace. (1990). The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books. Talmy, Leonard. (2000). Towards A Cognitive Semantics. Vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems .Massachusetts: MIT Press. Wolf, Werner. (2006). Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. In Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (Eds.), Framing Borders in Literature and Other media. New York: NY,. 1-41. Print. Wordsworth, William. (1994). The Collected Poems of Wordsworth. Intro. Antonia Till. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition Limited.

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