This topic is all about how and why writersFOREGROUND
parts of their texts and what meanings and effects are associated with
these foregroundings. The theory of FOREGROUNDING
is probably the most important theory within Stylistic Analysis, and foregrounding
analysis is arguably the most important part of the stylistic analysis
of any text.
The words 'foreground' and 'foregrounding' are themselves
foregrounded in the previous paragraph. They stand out perceptually as
a consequence of the fact that they DEVIATE
graphologically from the text which surrounds them in a number of ways.
The other words are in lower case, but they are capitalised. The other
words are black but they are multicoloured.
The other words are visually stable but they are irregular.
One way to produce foregrounding in a text, then, is through linguistic
deviation. Another way is to introduce extra linguistic patterning
into a text. The most common way of introducing this extra patterning
is by repeating linguistic structures more often than we would normally
expect to make parts of texts PARALLEL with one another. So, for example,
if you look at the last three sentences of the previous paragraph you
should feel that they are parallel to one another. They have the same
overall grammatical structure (grammatical parallelism) and some of the
words are repeated in identical syntactic locations.
Note that lots of the things we explored in terms of special meanings
and effects in the analysis of particular texts and textual extracts in
Topics 1 and 2 can be re-cast in terms of deviation, parallelism and foregrounding.
You may find it helpful, after you have found out more about these topics,
to revisit those earlier parts of this website and think about them in
terms of foregrounding theory.
To sum up, we can say that:
Now we need to work on FOREGROUNDING,
deviation and parallelism
in more detail.
