Page 103 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

FOREGROUNDING

The use of rhyme, alliteration and metrical rhythm amounts to just
such patternings at the level of sound in poetry.
Foregrounding may also be achieved through additional syntactic
patterning as in the following short poem by Shelley:

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother;
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

The first four lines of the poem are built up from a simple syntactic
pattern of the following type:

One –X– (is) too –Y– –Z–ed
For –M– to –Z– it;

where X ¼ noun, Y ¼ adverb, Z ¼ verb stem and M ¼ pronoun. The
pattern is so strong at the beginning of the poem that the second pair
of lines exactly parallels the syntax of the first pair. The rhetorical force
of the last two lines, however, derives – in part at least – from the way
in which it breaks from the pattern established so strongly at
beginning. In both these ways, therefore – by rule-making and rule-
breaking – elements of the language are foregrounded.
According to the Formalists this foregrounding was more than
language calling attention to itself. ‘Making strange’ the language in
this way was in fact part of making everyday experiences unfamiliar.
By manipulating the rules of the language, literature extends its
communicative possibilities, frees itself from its automatic ways of
rendering the world and achieves special rhetorical effects.
However, a crucial shortcoming of the Formalist account is the way
in which it neglected to notice some of the identical processes at work
in non-literary texts. Parallel structures of syntax, for instance, may be
found quite commonly in political speeches, advertising and other
kinds of persuasive discourse. Thus, when Neil Kinnock (a UK
Labour politician) produces the following sentences in the course of a
speech, he is adopting precisely the kind of repetitive syntactic
patterning identified by the Formalists as peculiar to poetry:

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