In stylistics, the notion of
foregrounding, a term borrowed from the Prague School of Linguistics, is used
to refer to ‘artistically motivated deviation’.
The term foregrounding, when used in a
literary sense, is a linguistic strategy that refers to the act of shifting
attention away from a main action or thought, by giving prominence to something
else that is occurring in the storyline. It is commonly used in poetry as a
means to deviate from normal speech patterns and bring attention from the
typical everyday subject being addressed, drawing attention instead to the use
of language, metaphors and alliteration.
Foregrounding is a significant
literary stylistic device based on the Russian Formalist's notion that the very
essence of poeticality lies in the "deformation" of language. The
Prague scholar Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1975) shaped the notion of foregrounding
into a scholarly literary concept.
"Foregrounding" literally
means "to bring to the front." The writer uses the sounds of words or
the words themselves in such a way that the readers' attention is immediately
captivated. The most common means employed by the writers is repetition. Our
attention is immediately captivated by the repetition of the sounds of certain
words or by the words themselves and we begin to analyse the reasons why the
writer is repeating this particular sound or word.
In the tongue twister, "she sells
sea shells on the sea shore" it is plain that 's' and 'sh' are
foregrounded for their euphonic effect.
In Julius Caesar Act III Sc.2 Mark
Antony in the famous funeral speech mocks at Brutus by repeatedly referring to
him as "honorable" and each time ironically implying the exactly the
opposite.
According to formalist critics,
foregrounding is a stylistic device that draws attention to itself by way of
its defamiliarization from everyday speech. It is the practice of making
something stand out from the surrounding words or images. It is “the ‘throwing
into relief’ of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of
ordinary language. It refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur in
literature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), the
grammatical level (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or the semantic level (e.g.,
metaphor, irony). As Mukarovský pointed out, foregrounding may occur in normal,
everyday language, such as spoken discourse or journalistic prose, but it
occurs at random with no systematic design. In literary texts, on the other
hand, foregrounding is structured: it tends to be both systematic and
hierarchical. That is, similar features may recur, such as a pattern of
assonance or a related group of metaphors, and one set of features will
dominate the others
There are two main types of
foregrounding: parallelism (grammar) and deviation.
Parallelism can be described as
unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity.
As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts.
Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular
context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual
surroundings (referred to as a 'secondary norm' or wider such as an entire
genre (referred to as a 'primary norm'.
For example, the last line of a poem
with a consistent metre may be foregrounded by changing the number of syllables
it contains. This would be an example of a deviation from a secondary norm.
In the following poem by E. E.
Cummings, there are two types of deviation:
“light’s lives lurch
a once world quickly from rises
army the gradual of unbeing fro
on stiffening greenly air and to
ghosts go
drift slippery hands tease slim float
twitter faces
Only stand with me, love! against
these its
until you are, and until i am
dreams...”
Firstly, most of the poem deviates from
'normal' language (primary deviation). In addition, there is secondary
deviation in that the penultimate line is unexpectedly different from the rest
of the poem.
Nursery rhymes, adverts and slogans
often exhibit parallelism in the form of repetition and rhyme, but parallelism
can also occur over longer texts. For example, jokes are often built on a
mixture of parallelism and deviation. They often consist of three parts or
characters. The first two are very similar (parallelism) and the third one starts
out as similar, but our expectations are thwarted when it turns out different
in end (deviation).
Foregrounding can occur on all levels
of language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, to
aid memorability and/or to invite interpretation. Verdonk states that
foregrounding is the psychological effect a literary reader has as s/he is
reading a work of literature.
The purpose of foregrounding is to
sharpen readers' vision and understanding of the event, feelings, circumstance,
concept, etc. that the author wants to point out in the hope of giving readers
new clarity, epiphany or motivation etc. The favored techniques for creating
foregrounding are patterns, such as repetitions; ambiguity, in which meaning is
clear but conclusions may be variable; metaphor; tone; parallelism; and
diction. Structural elements may also be foregrounded, such as character
development and plot structure. Any of these devices may be used to
defamiliarize the literary work through linguistic dislocation (i.e., atypical
language usage) so that the reader is struck by the author's points and aims
while submerged in a "strange" perspective of life and the world.
