Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

foregrounding
and the notion of the
poetic function
in language.
Foregrounding
Foregrounding
refers to a form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically
for literary-aesthetic purposes. Capable of working at any level of language, fore-
grounding typically involves a stylistic distortion of some sort, either through an
aspect of the text which deviates from a linguistic norm or, alternatively, where an
aspect of the text is brought to the fore through repetition or parallelism. That means
that foregrounding comes in two main guises: foregrounding as ‘deviation from a
norm’ and foregrounding as ‘more of the same’. Foregrounding is essentially a tech-
nique for ‘making strange’ in language, or to extrapolate from Shklovsky’s Russian
term 
ostranenie
, a method of ‘defamiliarisation’ in textual composition.
Whether the foregrounded pattern deviates from a norm, or whether it replicates
a pattern through parallelism, the point of foregrounding as a stylistic strategy is that
it should acquire salience in the act of drawing attention to itself. Furthermore, this
salience is motivated purely by literary considerations and as such constitutes an
important textual strategy for the development of images, themes and characters, and
for stimulating both effect and affect in a text’s interpretation. Foregrounding is not,
therefore, the simple by-product of this or that writer’s idiosyncratic predilections in
style. For example, Jonathan Swift, a writer with much to say about language and
style, was reputedly never very fond of words which were made up of only one
syllable. Whereas the relative scarcity of monosyllabic words in Swift’s work might
therefore be noticeable or salient, it is rather more a consequence of the personal
stylistic foibles of the writer than of a carefully modulated design in literary fore-
grounding. In sum, if a particular textual pattern is not motivated for artistic
purposes, then it is not foregrounding.
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B1

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The theory of foregrounding raises many issues to do with the stylistic analysis of
text, the most important of which is probably its reliance on the concept of a ‘norm’ in
language. Given the functional diversity of language, it is very difficult – if not impos-
sible – to say what exactly a ‘normal’ sentence in English actually is. This constitutes a
substantial challenge to foregrounding theory because the theory presupposes that
there exists a notional linguistic yardstick against which a particular feature of style can
be measured. A related issue concerns what happens when a once deviant pattern
becomes established in a text. Does it stay foregrounded for the entire duration of the
text? Or does it gradually and unobtrusively slip into the background?
One way of addressing these important questions is through a short illustration.
Unit C8 of this book develops a workshop in practical stylistics which is based on a
passage from Ernest Hemingway’s novella 
The Old Man and the Sea
(1952). That
passage arguably typifies Hemingway’s written style, a style which literary critics have
described with epithets like ‘flat’, ‘dry’, ‘restrained’, ‘journalistic’ or even ‘tough guy’
(see C8). These observations are largely based on a perceived scarcity of adjectives
in the writer’s work, which is correlated with the ‘machismo’ feel of much of his
narrative style. It is indeed true that in the first few lines of the passage analysed in
C8, almost all of the nouns receive 
no
adjectival modification at all: ‘the tuna’, ‘the
stern’, ‘the gaff ’, ‘the line’ and ‘the fish’. Let us accept for the moment, then, that
this marked non-adjectival pattern is foregrounded because it deviates from our
expectations about the ‘normal’ style of twentieth-century prose fiction.
Such an interpretation immediately raises two interconnected problems. The first,
as noted above, concerns the degree to which the ‘no-adjective’ pattern is able to stay
foregrounded before it gradually slips into the background. The second is about what
would happen should a phrase that 
did
contain adjectives suddenly appear in the
text; that is, should a structure occur whose very use of adjectives goes against 
the foregrounded pattern. As it happens, there is elsewhere in the novella a rather
startling example of such a deviation. When a poisonous jellyfish approaches the 
old man’s boat, the narrative refers to it as ‘the purple, formalised iridescent gelati-
nous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war’ (Hemingway 1960 [1952]: 28). This is
stylistically somewhat of a quantum leap insofar as the simple article-plus-noun
configuration gives way here to a sequence of not one but 
four
adjectives which are
built up before the main noun (‘bladder’). The old fisherman’s superstitious mistrust
of this dangerous animal, this ‘whore of the sea’ as he puts it, is captured in a styl-
istic flourish and with a type of hyperbole that would not be out of place in a D. H.
Lawrence novel. The upshot of this is that foregrounding can be seen to work on
two levels, both across and within texts. Whereas Hemingway’s so-called ‘flat’ noun
phrases may be foregrounded against the notional external stylistic backdrop of the
twentieth century novella, their repetition in the text develops a norm which is itself
susceptible to violation. This type of secondary foregrounding, known as