Transcript Language and Literature

Chapter Nine
Language and
Literature
1. Foregrounding
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The 1960 dream of high rise living soon
turned into a nightmare.
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Four storeys have no windows left to smash
But in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
Mother and daughter the last mistresses
Of that black block condemned to stand, not
crash.
The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to
the disappearing shore. She left the
maharajah; she left innumerable other lights
o’ passing love in towns and cities and
theatres and railway stations all over the
world. But Melchior she did not leave.
1.1 What is ‘foregrounding’?
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Frank Hakemulder & Willie van Peer:
In a purely linguistic sense, the term
'foregrounding' is used to refer to new
information, in contrast to elements in the
sentence which form the background
against which the new elements are to be
understood by the listener / reader.
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In the wider sense of stylistics, text
linguistics, and literary studies, it is a
translation of the Czech aktualisace
(actualization), a term common with the
Prague Structuralists. In this sense it has
become a spatial metaphor: that of a
foreground and a background, which allows
the term to be related to issues in perception
psychology, such as figure / ground
constellations.
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The English term 'foregrounding' has come
to mean several things at once:
the (psycholinguistic) processes by which during the reading act - something may be
given special prominence
specific devices (as produced by the author)
located in the text itself. It is also employed
to indicate the specific poetic effect on the
reader.
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an analytic category in order to evaluate
literary texts, or to situate them historically,
or to explain their importance and cultural
significance.
to differentiate literature from other varieties
of language use, such as everyday
conversations or scientific reports.
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Thus the term covers a wide area of
meaning. This may have its advantages, but
may also be problematic: which of the above
meanings is intended must often be
deduced from the context in which the term
is used.
1.2 Devices of Foregrounding
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Outside literature, so the assumption goes,
language tends to be automatized; its
structures and meanings are used routinely.
Within literature, however, this is opposed
by devices which thwart the automatism
with which language is read, processed, or
understood. Generally, two such devices
may be distinguished, those of deviation
and of parallelism.
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Deviation corresponds to the traditional idea
of poetic license: the writer of literature is
allowed - in contrast to the everyday speaker to deviate from rules, maxims, or conventions.
These may involve the language, as well as
literary traditions or expectations set up by the
text itself. The result is some degree of
surprise in the reader, and his / her attention is
thereby drawn to the form of the text itself
(rather than to its content). Cases of neologism,
live metaphor, or ungrammatical sentences, as
well as archaisms, paradox, and oxymoron (the
traditional tropes) are clear examples of
deviation.
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Devices of parallelism are characterized by
repetitive structures: (part of) a verbal
configuration is repeated (or contrasted),
thereby being promoted into the foreground
of the reader's perception.
Traditional handbooks of poetics and
rhetoric have surveyed and described (under
the category of figures of speech) a wide
variety of such forms of parallelism, e.g.,
rhyme, assonance, alliteration, meter,
semantic symmetry, or antistrophe.
2. Literal language and
figurative language
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Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend
me your ears…
Anthony in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
2.1 Simile
O, my luve is like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O, my luve is like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
Robert Burns
(1759-96)
2.2 Metaphor
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances.
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages …
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
2.3 Metonymy
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings;
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked Scythe and Spade.
James Shirley (1596-1666)
2.4 Synecdoche
 They
were short of hands at harvest time.
(part for whole)
 Have you any coppers? (material for thing
made)
 He is a poor creature. (genus for species)
 He is the Newton of this century.
(individual for class)
3. Analysis of literary language
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Foregrounding on the level of lexis
Foregrounding on the level of syntax: word
order, word groups, deviant or marked
structures
Rewriting for comparative studies
Meaning
Context
Figurative language
4. The language of poetry
Little Bo-peep
Has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone
And they will come home
Waggling their tails behind them
Fair is foul and foul is fair
Hover through wind and murky air
Hark! The herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King!
Long burned hair brushes
Across my face its spider
Silk. I smell lavender
Cinnamon: my mother’s clothes.
4.1 Forms of sound patterning
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Rhyme
Alliteration
Assonance
Consonance
Reverse rhyme
Pararhyme
Repetition
4.2 Stress patterning
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Iamb: 2 syllables, unstressed + stressed
Trochee: 2 syllables, stressed + unstressed
Anapest: 3 syllables, 2 unstressed + stressed
Dactyl: 3 syllables, stressed + 2 unstressed
Spondee: 2 stressed syllables
Pyrrhic: 2 unstressed syllables
4.3 Metrical patterning
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Dimetre: 2 feet
Trimetre: 3 feet
Tetrametre: 4 feet
Pentametre: 5 feet
Hexametre: 6 feet
Heptametre: 7 feet
Octametre: 8 feet
4.4 Conventional forms
of metre and sound
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Couplets: 2 lines of verse, usually connected
by a rhyme
Quatrains: Stanzas of four lines
Blank verse: lines in iambic pentametre
which do not rhyme
Sonnet
Free verse
Limericks etc.
4.5 The poetic functions
of sound and metre
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Aesthetic pleasure
Conforming to a form
Expressing/innovating with a form
Demonstrating skill, intellectual pleasure
For emphasis or contrast
Onomatopoeia
4.6 The analysis of poetry
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Info about the poem: poet, period, genre,
topic, etc.
Structure: layout, number of lines, length of
lines, metre, rhymes, sound effects, etc. plus
general comment on the poem
5. The language of fiction
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From realism to modernism
It had been an easy birth, but then for Abel and
Zaphia Rosnovski nothing had ever been easy,
and in their own ways they had both become
philosophical about that. Abel had wanted a son,
an heir who would one day be chairman of the
Baron Group. By the time the boy was ready to
take over, Abel was confident that his own name
would stand alongside those of Ritz and Statler
and by then the Baron would be the largest hotel
group in the world.
Abel had paced up and down the colourless
corridor of St. Luke’s Hospital waiting for the
first cry, his slight limp becoming more
pronounced as each hour passed. Occasionally
he twisted the silver band that encircled his wrist
and stared at the name so neatly engraved on it.
He turned and retraced his steps once again, to
see Doctor Dodek heading towards him.
Jeffrey Archer: The Prodigal Daughter
There is the Hart of the Wud in the Eusa Story
that wer a stage every 1 knows that. There is the
hart of the wood meaning the veryes deap of it
thats a nother thing. There is the hart of the
wood where they bern the chard coal thats a
nother thing agen innit. Thats a nother thing.
Berning the chard coal in the hart of the wood.
That’s what they call the stack of wood you see.
The stack of wood in the shape they do it for
chard coal berning. Why do they call it the hart
tho? That’s what this here story tels of.
Russell Hoban: Ridley Walker
5.1 Fictional prose and point of
view
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I-narrators
Third-person narrators
Schema-oriented language
Given vs New information
Deixis
5.2 Speech presentation
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Direct speech (DS)
Free indirect speech (FIS)
Indirect speech (IS)
Narrator’s representation of speech acts
(NRSA)
Narrator’s representation of speech (NRS)
5.3 Thought presentation
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Narrator’s representation of thought (NRT)
Narrator’s representation of thought acts
(NRTA)
Indirect thought (IT)
Free indirect thought (FIT)
Direct thought (DT)
Stream of consciousness
5.4 Prose style
 Authorial style
 Text style
5.5 Analyzing the language of
fiction
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Lexis/vocabulary
Grammatical organization
Textual organization
Figures of speech
Style variation
Discoursal patterning
Viewpoint manipulation
6. The language of drama
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Drama as poetry
Drama as fiction
Drama as conversation
6.1 Analyzing dramatic language
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Turn quantity and length
Exchange sequence
Production errors
The cooperative principle
Status marked through language
Register
Speech and silence
6.2 Analyzing dramatic texts
Paraphrasing
 Commentating
 Using theories
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