Transcript Sty lec 11.pptx

Foregrounding
ENG 551
Stylistics
Lecture 11
Foregrounding
• Foregrounding has its origin with Czech theorist
Jean Mukarovsky.
• The term foregrounding is borrowed by stylisticians
form art criticism, which distinguishes between the
foreground and the background of a painting.
• The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of
things as they are perceived, and not as they are
known
Foregrounding in Art
• It is a general principal of artistic communication
that a work of art in some way deviates form norms
which we as members of a society have learnt to
expect in the medium used.
• A painting does not simply reproduce the visual
stimuli, what is artistically significant is how it
deviates form photographic accuracy, form simply
being a copy of e.g. nature.
• And abstract painting is interesting according to
how it deviates from mass produced regularity of
pattern, form absolute symmetry.
Foregrounding in Art
Foregrounding
• Refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur in
literature
Phonetic level: alliteration, rhyme
Grammatical level: inversion, ellipsis
Semantic level: metaphor, irony
Foregrounding
• allows literature to present meaning with intricacy
which ordinary language does not allow.
• immediate effect is to make objects strange and to
achieve defamiliarization.
Foregrounding may occur in everyday language, e.g.
spoken discourse, journalistic prose but at random, with
no systematic design.
In literary texts foregrounding is structured, systematic
and hierarchial.
e.g. patterns of assonance, related group of metaphors,
imagery form a particular domain etc.
Foregrounding
• Foregrounding theory is related to such qualities as
surprise and importance; refreshing and changing
readers’ mental representation. It also describes
which defamiliarization strategies these readers
make use of and what the role of feeling is in this
process.
• Foregrounding provides readers with striking
passages and experiences of defamiliarization,
which arouses feelings and the readers work
towards retrieving experience.
Foregrounding
• The act of communication becomes secondary.
Primary focus of the reader is on style.
• In poetic language foregrounding achieves
maximum intensity to the extent of pushing
communication to the background as the object of
expression used for its own sake.
• Geoffery Leech places deviation in a wider
aesthetic context by connecting it with general
principle of foregrounding.
Geoffery Leech “A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry”
Foregrounding
• As a general rule, anyone who wishes to investigate
the significance and value of a work art must
concentrate on the element of interest and
surprise.
• The application of this concept to poetry is obvious
. The foregrounded figure is the linguistic deviation
and the background is the language.
Foregrounding
• “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of
things as they are perceived and not as they are
known. The technique of art is to make object
unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the
process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged” (Victor Shklovlsky)
• The function of art is to renew our awareness of
things that have become habitual objects of
everyday awareness. For him the devices used by
writhers are not merely there for ornamental
purpose they serve specific functions.
Foregrounding
•
Foregrounding
Defamiliarization
Automatization
Deviation
Parallelism
Tropes
Schemes