Page 102 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

FOREGROUNDING

others. The ideological implications of this process are that certain
privileged positions in culture are able to present themselves as beyond
discourse and outside of the act of naming.
See also: Identity politics, Representation

Further reading: Fiske (1989b)

FOREGROUNDING

A communicative element may be said to be foregrounded when it is
made the focus of attention for its own sake. The term derives from
the work of the Russian and Czech Formalists during the 1920s who
developed the concept as part of a theory which argued that literature
was a specialised and distinctive mode of communication. Literature
(and poetry in particular) was different from everyday communication
because of the systematic foregrounding of selected linguistic
components. These stood out against the background of everyday
communicative norms in one of two ways – either by rule-breaking or
by rule-making. Thus, one kind of foregrounding consists of
manipulating the normal rules of linguistic communication by
bending or breaking them, as in the following poem by e. e.
cummings:

Me up at does
out of the floor
quietly Stare
a poisoned mouse
still who alive
is asking What
have i done that
You wouldn’t have

Among other things, the first four lines scramble the more usual
ordering of elements in an English clause, which in normal prose
writing would be likely to read ‘a poisoned mouse does quietly stare
up at me out of the floor’. This is one of several ways (including, for
example, the adoption of unusual patterns of punctuation) in which
the poem breaks the normal rules of English.
Another kind of foregrounding involves the superimposition of
extra rules or patterns beyond those required to ensure intelligibility.

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