In stylistics, the notion offoregrounding, a term borrowed from the Prague School of Linguistics, is usedto refer to ‘artistically motivated deviation’.
The term foregrounding, when used in aliterary sense, is a linguistic strategy that refers to the act of shiftingattention away from a main action or thought, by giving prominence to somethingelse that is occurring in the storyline. It is commonly used in poetry as ameans to deviate from normal speech patterns and bring attention from thetypical everyday subject being addressed, drawing attention instead to the useof language, metaphors and alliteration.
Foregrounding is a significantliterary stylistic device based on the Russian Formalist's notion that the veryessence of poeticality lies in the "deformation" of language. ThePrague scholar Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1975) shaped the notion of foregroundinginto a scholarly literary concept.
"Foregrounding" literallymeans "to bring to the front." The writer uses the sounds of words orthe words themselves in such a way that the readers' attention is immediatelycaptivated. The most common means employed by the writers is repetition. Ourattention is immediately captivated by the repetition of the sounds of certainwords or by the words themselves and we begin to analyse the reasons why thewriter is repeating this particular sound or word.
In the tongue twister, "she sellssea shells on the sea shore" it is plain that 's' and 'sh' areforegrounded for their euphonic effect.
In Julius Caesar Act III Sc.2 MarkAntony in the famous funeral speech mocks at Brutus by repeatedly referring tohim as "honorable" and each time ironically implying the exactly theopposite.
According to formalist critics,foregrounding is a stylistic device that draws attention to itself by way ofits defamiliarization from everyday speech. It is the practice of makingsomething stand out from the surrounding words or images. It is “the ‘throwinginto relief’ of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms ofordinary language. It refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur inliterature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), thegrammatical 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 itoccurs at random with no systematic design. In literary texts, on the otherhand, foregrounding is structured: it tends to be both systematic andhierarchical. That is, similar features may recur, such as a pattern ofassonance or a related group of metaphors, and one set of features willdominate the others
There are two main types offoregrounding: parallelism (grammar) and deviation.
Parallelism can be described asunexpected 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 particularcontext. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textualsurroundings (referred to as a 'secondary norm' or wider such as an entiregenre (referred to as a 'primary norm'.
For example, the last line of a poemwith a consistent metre may be foregrounded by changing the number of syllablesit 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 toghosts go
drift slippery hands tease slim floattwitter faces
Only stand with me, love! againstthese its
until you are, and until i amdreams...”
Firstly, most of the poem deviates from'normal' language (primary deviation). In addition, there is secondarydeviation in that the penultimate line is unexpectedly different from the restof the poem.
Nursery rhymes, adverts and slogansoften exhibit parallelism in the form of repetition and rhyme, but parallelismcan also occur over longer texts. For example, jokes are often built on amixture of parallelism and deviation. They often consist of three parts orcharacters. The first two are very similar (parallelism) and the third one startsout as similar, but our expectations are thwarted when it turns out differentin end (deviation).
Foregrounding can occur on all levelsof language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, toaid memorability and/or to invite interpretation. Verdonk states thatforegrounding is the psychological effect a literary reader has as s/he isreading a work of literature.
The purpose of foregrounding is tosharpen readers' vision and understanding of the event, feelings, circ*mstance,concept, etc. that the author wants to point out in the hope of giving readersnew clarity, epiphany or motivation etc. The favored techniques for creatingforegrounding are patterns, such as repetitions; ambiguity, in which meaning isclear but conclusions may be variable; metaphor; tone; parallelism; anddiction. Structural elements may also be foregrounded, such as characterdevelopment and plot structure. Any of these devices may be used todefamiliarize the literary work through linguistic dislocation (i.e., atypicallanguage usage) so that the reader is struck by the author's points and aimswhile submerged in a "strange" perspective of life and the world.
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