Stylistics and Psychology

Investigations of Foregrounding

Willie Van Peer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000292121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

First published in 1986, Stylistics and Psychology is an empirical investigation into foregrounding.

The theory of foregrounding has received little in the way of empirical testing within the field of stylistics and literary criticism. The book engages extensively with the author's own research involving psychological testing and provides a rigorous, scientific approach to stylistics. It presents evidence of a general link between foregrounding and evaluation, apparent in correlations between foregrounding and evaluation, between foregrounding and reader preference, and between foregrounding and readers' evaluative associations.

Stylistics and Psychology will appeal to those with an interest in literary criticism and linguistics.

Chapter One
THE THEORY OF FOREGROUNDING: THE STATE OF THE ART

INTRODUCTION

This chapter reviews the major contributions made to the theory of foregrounding, from its roots in Russian Formalism, its elaboration in (Prague) Structuralism, to its further development in (British) stylistics. Attention will also be given to the influence of linguistics on the concept, and to its application in actual analyses of literary texts. The chapter concludes with a proposal of what could be called a 'standard' form of the theory.

FORMALISM

As is the case with so many present-day notions in the theory of literature, the notion of foregrounding similarly has its roots in the work of the Russian Formalists. The name most often associated with the concept in this connection, is that of Viktor Šklovskij. The function of art, in his view, is to make people aware of the world in a fresh way. The device whereby this is achieved is defamiliarization, or 'making strange' (Russian 'ostranenie').

And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. 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 objects '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. (Šklovskij 1917: 12)¹

Thus Šklovskij's theory of literature is a functional one. The task of the poet is to counteract the routine of the reader's attachment to clichés, stock responses and automatized perception, by cutting the familiar objects and events out of their habitual context and portraying them as if they were seen for the first time, hence bringing about a heightened awareness of the world. Thus Šklovskij opposes automatization to perceptibility. It is the latter quality that the artist strives towards. The effect is density ('faktura'), which hinders ease of communication, hence resulting in retardation: the processes of perception and of comprehension are slowed down. The reader is forced to come to grips with the world of the text in a more strenuous and supposedly more rewarding fashion. The main emphasis in the work of Šklovskij and other Formalists was consequently geared at the devices which may activate these processes when readers are confronted with literary works of art.

This led the Formalists, as their name readily indicates to study literature mainly in its formal aspects. One notices in the whole movement a concentration on the poetic text itself, and they stubbornly refused to be diverted from it; cp. Jameson (1972: 43), Pomorska (1968: 120). This eventually led to a sharper formulation of the concept of foregrounding. Against the oversimplification of their predecessors, the Formalists proposed to conceive of literature in terms of deviance from norms.² This idea, originally developed by Šklovskij in his notion of estrangement, was widely accepted in the Formalist ranks, notably by Tomaševskij, Ejxenbaum, Tynjanov, and Jakubinskij; see Erlich (1965: 183-185; 235; 288-289).

The Formalists were not the first, nor the only ones, to advance such a theory of literature, cp. Erlich (1965: 179-180); Milic (1969: 164); Wellek & Warren (1956: 242). In fact it echoed Aristotle's Poetics³: 'the unfamiliarity due to this deviation from normal usages will raise the diction above the commonplace, while the retention of some part of the normal forms will make for clarity,' (Dorsch 1965: 63; my emphasis).

The views of the Formalists are not without problems, though. One concerns their use of terminology. Firstly their technical terms are often near to being synonymous, for instance: perceptibility and palpability, defamiliarization and de-automatization, making strange and deformation. For the systematic compilation of Formalist terminology and the context of their theoretical development, see O'Toole & Shukman (1977).

A more serious problem relates to what exactly the concept of defamiliarization stands for. Šklovskij himself was notoriously unsystematic in his use of terms; compare Schmid (1973), Jameson (1972: 52-53). A term such as 'making strange' or 'defamiliarization', for instance, may refer to two things. On the one hand it is meant to describe properties of the actual text, i.e. the literary devices that can be located in the text itself. On the other hand it points to the effect such devices may have on a reader. These two meanings are in fact blended together in the terms employed by Šklovskij and several other Formalists. This can be understood in the light of their aim to develop a functional theory of literature, where text and reader both have their place. However, such terminological bivalency may easily be missed, as is witnessed by Doležel (196S: 150), who complains that the notion of defamiliarization contains a strong psychological bias, which was eventually redressed by more linguistically orientated scholars, such as Roman Jakobson.

Evaluating the work of the Russian Formalists, in particular Škiovskij's concept of 'making strange', Wellek & Warren (1956: 242) remark that it lays too much emphasis on the values of novelty and surprise<R>⁴</R>, and that it is notably 'relativist'. Wellek (1971: 67) argues, in agreement with Stankiewicz (1960: 70), that poetry need not violate any rules of language and still remain what it is, 'a highly patterned and organized mode of verbal expression'. Jameson (1972: 42-98) adds to this that the broader social functions of literature are not taken into account, and that the theory comes close to being tautological.

Perhaps the most fundamental objection raised by Jameson is of a logical nature. If the concept of defamiliarization is called upon to describe and explain the reception of literary works, then one may wonder what will happen when the reading public becomes conscious (or weary) of 'art as defamiliarization'. Presumably, the pendulum may then swing back, and the concept of defamiliarization becomes self-abolishing. And as Jameson (1972: 91) ironically remarks, if it goes, the entire theory goes with it.

The question is, however, whether readers will ever get tired of defamiliarization as such. A certain remoteness from the habitual does seem to be a fundamental characteristic of art; compare Kreitler & Kreitler (1972: 157-163; 223-224). The device of defamiliarization may profitably be invoked to describe particular aspects of this remoteness in analysing literary works of art.

The Formalists saw the literary text as their prime source of investigation. At the same time they shifted the theoretical attention in the direction of the reader's interaction with the text. It is this concentration on the reception of the poetic text that made possible their formulation of a functional theory of literature, with its bearing on the anthropological study of art; see Schmid (1973: 265). It provided a psychological explanation for the internal organization of the poetic text, for its perception by the reader and a sociological rationale for the dynamics of literary evolution. It is in Jakobson & Tynjanov (1928) - see O'Toole & Shukman, vol. 4 (1977: 49-51) - that one finds a new awareness of literary phenomena which resulted in a model in which most of the earlier dilemmas were resolved. Fokkema (1976: 163) observes that, when they started studying (and stressing) the interdependence of the various elements of literature as opposed to their earlier emphasis on devices in isolation, however, the shift towards structuralism became fact. For further historical treatment of the ideas generated by Russian Formalist theory of literature, see Dolezel (1968), Erlich (1965), Flaker & Zmegač (1974), Fokkema (1976).

STRUCTURALISM

The term 'foregrounding' itself was introduced into the study of literature in the West by Garvin (1964), as a translation of the Czech 'aktualisace', employed in the works of several Prague scholars. Just as the Formalists the Prague Structuralists were intrigued by the nature of artistic phenomena and the role they play in human society. At the same time their own aim was to embed such a functional approach in the framework of their structuralist linguistics, which had by that time provided interesting insights and methods. In this perspective Havránek (in Garvin: 1964) develops his argument on the functional differentiation of the standard language. On the basis of three processes (intellectualization, automatization, and foregrounding) Havránek proposes differentiation of a language into three modes⁵: that of scientific language, where the function is accuracy, everyday language, which is geared to conventional communicative purposes, and poetic language, which attracts attention to itself by virtue of the foregrounding devices it contains.

Havráanek conceives of this classificatory system as a graded opposition, with scientific language on the one extreme, and the automatisms of everyday language situated in the middle of the scale. At the other extreme one finds poetic language, typically displaying foregrounding devices. This does not imply that everything within poetic language will be foregrounded, because it needs for its very existence the presence of automatized language. The crucial difference however, according to Havránek, between poetic and everyday language, is that the former cannot be limited to automatized language, while the latter usually is. Various criticisms of such distinctions between poetic and everyday language have been proposed; see, for instance, Culler (1975: 161-164), Fish (1973), Pratt (1977). But the fact that the critical discussion around the relationship between literary and non-literary uses of language continues, shows that the issue is still very much alive, and to some extent, unresolved.

Perhaps the most influential figure in shaping the concept of foregrounding has been the Prague scholar Jan Mukařovský, His ideas gradually found their way to the West through other Czech figures, such as René Wellek, F. Vodička, L. Doležel, etc. The major breakthrough came with the publication of Garvin (1964) which contains two seminal articles: Mukařovský (1964a) and (1964b). According to Mukařovský, the essence of poetic language lies in the violations of the norms of the standard language, and this relationship is seen as essential for the very existence of poetry, while at the same time the violations of the standard found in poetry enrich the standard language itself (see Mukařvský: 1964a: 51-54): 'its systematic violation is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language; without this possibility there would be no poetry¹. In this sense, Mukařovský takes over the notion already formulated by the Russian Formalists that the very essence of poeticality lies in the deformation of the language, in the violation of its rules. It is interesting to note, however, especially with regard to later approaches in which the two aspects of deviation and parallelism were unified, that Mukařovský also makes some oblique references to parallelism (1977: 23).

As such, poetic language is not defined in terms of its properties, but in terms of its function, which lies in its aesthetic effect. This aesthetic effect results from the fact that attention is concentrated on the linguistic sign itself, and not, as in ordinary language, on the communicative result. In everyday speech, such a concentration on the sign itself would only hamper efficient communication. Hence everyday speech is largely automatized, and any aesthetic effect that may occur, is subordinate to the flow of ideas. Poetic language then draws from the stock furnished by other levels of language, especially the literary varieties of the standard language, which constitute the background against which the linguistic aspects of the work are perceived. Any deviations from the standard language (in its literary form) are evaluated in poetry as artistic devices.

The aim of the poet must consequently lie in achieving the maximum of foregrounding. However, this is not a matter of quantities. Indeed, as Mukařovský argues, 'foregrounding arises from the fact that a given component in some way, more or less conspicuously, deviates from current usage. If, however, all the components of the work laid claim to this difference, it would no longer be different. The simultaneous foregrounding of all the components is therefore unthinkable' (1964bi 65; compare also 1964a: 4^). The maximum of foregrounding is defined by Mukařovský as a result of two forces. One of these resides in the relational character of foregrounding, the other in its consistent and systematic character. A tension arises from the structure of the literary work of art, which is seen as a complex yet unified aesthetic structure, defined by the interrelationships between those items that are foregrounded and those elements in the work that remain in the background (1964a: 48; 1964b: 65). Simultaneously the (good) poet will avoid random deviations. Instead he will try to work towards unity of the work by making the foregrounded components point in the same direction. Such systematic foregrounding creates the most powerful aesthetic structure that a poet can hope for.

A result of the relational character of foregrounding, as outlined above, lies in the indivisibility of the literary work of art: (1964b: 66; 1964a: 45). If the structure of the work hinges on the balance between foregrounded elements and their background, any change in this equilibrium will change the entire network of relationships. Mukařovský thus emphasizes the aesthetic effect that is sought by the poet when introducing foregrounding into his writing, or that is experienced by the reader when encountering it. Such instances of foregrounding are seen as a deviation from current usage, be it the usage of the standard language, or the general set of rules tied to the poetic canon of a given historical period. As such foregrounding is the violation of the schematization of an act.

In other places Mukařovský provides further characteristics of foregrounding: its uncommonness and novelty (1964a: 50), its unexpectedness, unusualness and uniqueness (1964a: 53). This idea that literature results from a deviation from current usage squares with the fact that ordinary speech may contain a high amount of foregrounding too, as Mukařovský himself points out. As examples he cites (1964b: 36-39) the language games children play, onomatopoeia, similes and metaphors that are uncommon and individual, invectives, the choice of less common words, the use of foreign words or dialect expressions, and the use of various foregrounding devices in advertising. How then, can foregrounding be the hallmark of literature in general, or poetry in particular? Mukařovský argues that in all these cases foregrounding devices are employed to attract attention to the subject-matter of the communicative situation, while in poetry they are geared towards themselves, i.e. in order to draw attention to the speech event itself.

The essential difference of foregrounding within and outside the field of literature therefore rests with the yardstick that is used to measure the effect of the particular case of foregrounding. Outside literature this yardstick is the set of aesthetic norms that a society provides. Within poetry the yardstick is the degree of integration of foregrounding into the complete structure of the work. Mukařovský (1964b: 32-35) calls this the 'structured' aesthetic, while the occurrence of foregrounding in everyday language is labelled the 'unstructured' aesthetic. The latter works toward the practical, the momentary, while the former tries to achieve permanence and generality (in the sense of being independent of the speaker or of the concrete communicative situation). However, the relationship between the unstructured and the structured aesthetic, as well as that between the standard language and its use in poetry, is not a static one. There is, for one thing, a mutual interpenetration, in that the standard language provides the background against which foregrounding takes place, thereby constraining the kind ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. THE THEORY OF FOREGROUNDING: THE STATE OF THE ART
• 2. DESIGN OF VALIDATION PROCEDURES
• 3. ANALYSIS OF THE POEMS AND PREDICTIONS MADE
• 4. THE VALIDITY OF FOREGROUNDING
• 5. FURTHER REFINEMENTS: DESIGN OF INDUCTIVE PROCEDURE
• 6. FOREGROUNDING IN TEXT AND READER RESPONSE
• 7. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX 1. The Data Collecting Instruments
• APPENDIX 2. The Empirical Data
• APPENDIX 3. Regression Matrix