Page 104 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

FOREGROUNDING

We are ruled by a Government
whose rhetoric is resolution but whose reality is industrial ruin,
whose rhetoric is efficiency but whose reality is collapse.
Their rhetoric is morality,
their reality is unemployment, which splits or scatters families.

Similar kinds of syntactic patterning may also be found in advertising:

PERFUMERY
THE PERFUME YOU WEAR SAYS A LOT ABOUT YOU
The range we have says something about us.
Nothing triggers memories as strongly as scent.
Just a hint of a familiar fragrance brings back that Time.
That Place.
That Person.
Names are forgettable
Even photos fade,
But perfume lingers.

Here again, as with the poem and the speech, we can find in the first
two lines of the advert a parallel syntactic structure:

The –X– –Y– –Z– says –N– about –Y

where X ¼ noun, Y ¼ pronoun, Z ¼ verb and N ¼ quantifying
expression. We also have quite marked sound patterning with an
identical initial sound used in the words ‘familiar’, ‘fragrance’,
‘forgettable’, ‘photos’, ‘fade’ and ‘place’, ‘person’, ‘perfume’. In light
of evidence such as this, it would seem that the attempt of the
Formalists to identify poetry (or even ‘literariness’) with foregrounded
features of language is impossible to sustain. Instead, what counts as
poetry seems to be as much a matter of social judgements as textual
properties. However, this does not mean that the notion of
foregrounding is thereby only of historical interest. It is noticeable,
for instance, that the kind of extract singled out above from a political
speech is precisely that part of the speech most likely to elicit applause
in the context of its initial delivery, and the part most likely to be
excerpted for subsequent news broadcasts. Foregrounded uses of
language, therefore, seem to be strongly associated outside literature
with rhetoric – with acts of verbal persuasion – and the notion of
foregrounding retains its interest as part of this broader study.

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