Chapter 9 Language and Literature

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Chapter 9Language and Literature
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1. Foregrounding

• The 1960 dream of high rise living soon turned
  into a nightmare.
• Four storeys have no windows left to smash
• But in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
• Mother and daughter the last mistresses
• Of that black block condemned to stand, not
• crash.

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• The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the
  disappearing shore. She left the maharajah she
  left innumerable other lights o passing love in
  towns and cities and theatres and railway
  stations all over the world. But Melchior she did
  not leave.

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1.1 What is foregrounding?

• Frank Hakemulder Willie van Peer
• In a purely linguistic sense, the term
  'foregrounding' is used to refer to new
  information, in contrast to elements in the
  sentence which form the background against which
  the new elements are to be understood by the
  listener / reader.

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• In the wider sense of stylistics, text
  linguistics, and literary studies, it is a
  translation of the Czech aktualisace
  (actualization), a term common with the Prague
  Structuralists. In this sense it has become a
  spatial metaphor that of a foreground and a
  background, which allows the term to be related
  to issues in perception psychology, such as
  figure / ground constellations.

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• The English term 'foregrounding' has come to mean
  several things at once
• the (psycholinguistic) processes by which -
  during the reading act - something may be given
  special prominence
• specific devices (as produced by the author)
  located in the text itself. It is also employed
  to indicate the specific poetic effect on the
  reader.

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• an analytic category in order to evaluate
  literary texts, or to situate them historically,
  or to explain their importance and cultural
  significance.
• to differentiate literature from other varieties
  of language use, such as everyday conversations
  or scientific reports.

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• Thus the term covers a wide area of meaning. This
  may have its advantages, but may also be
  problematic which of the above meanings is
  intended must often be deduced from the context
  in which the term is used.

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1.2 Devices of Foregrounding

• Outside literature, so the assumption goes,
  language tends to be automatized its structures
  and meanings are used routinely. Within
  literature, however, this is opposed by devices
  which thwart the automatism with which language
  is read, processed, or understood. Generally, two
  such devices may be distinguished, those of
  deviation and of parallelism.

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• Deviation corresponds to the traditional idea of
  poetic license the writer of literature is
  allowed - in contrast to the everyday speaker -
  to deviate from rules, maxims, or conventions.
  These may involve the language, as well as
  literary traditions or expectations set up by the
  text itself. The result is some degree of
  surprise in the reader, and his / her attention
  is thereby drawn to the form of the text itself
  (rather than to its content). Cases of neologism,
  live metaphor, or ungrammatical sentences, as
  well as archaisms, paradox, and oxymoron (the
  traditional tropes) are clear examples of
  deviation.

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• Devices of parallelism are characterized by
  repetitive structures (part of) a verbal
  configuration is repeated (or contrasted),
  thereby being promoted into the foreground of the
  reader's perception.
• Traditional handbooks of poetics and rhetoric
  have surveyed and described (under the category
  of figures of speech) a wide variety of such
  forms of parallelism, e.g., rhyme, assonance,
  alliteration, meter, semantic symmetry, or
  antistrophe.

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2. Literal language and figurative language

• Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your
  ears
• Anthony in Shakespeares
• Julius Caesar

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2.1 Simile

• O, my luve is like a red, red rose,
• Thats newly sprung in June
• O, my luve is like the melodie
• Thats sweetly playd in tune.
• Robert Burns
• (1759-96)

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2.2 Metaphor

• All the worlds a stage,
• And all the men and women merely players
• They have their exits and their entrances.
• And one man in his time plays many parts,
• His acts being seven ages
• William Shakespeare
• (1564-1616)

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2.3 Metonymy

• There is no armour against fate
• Death lays his icy hand on kings
• Sceptre and Crown
• Must tumble down
• And in the dust be equal made
• With the poor crooked Scythe and Spade.
• James Shirley (1596-1666)

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2.4 Synecdoche

• They were short of hands at harvest time. (part
  for whole)
• Have you any coppers? (material for thing made)
• He is a poor creature. (genus for species)
• He is the Newton of this century. (individual for
  class)

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3. Analysis of literary language

• Foregrounding on the level of lexis
• Foregrounding on the level of syntax word order,
  word groups, deviant or marked structures
• Rewriting for comparative studies
• Meaning
• Context
• Figurative language

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4. The language of poetry

• Little Bo-peep
• Has lost her sheep
• And doesnt know where to find them
• Leave them alone
• And they will come home
• Waggling their tails behind them

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Fair is foul and foul is fairHover through wind
and murky air

• Hark! The herald angels sing
• Glory to the newborn King!

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Long burned hair brushes Across my face its
spider Silk. I smell lavender Cinnamon my
mothers clothes.
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4.1 Forms of sound patterning

• Rhyme
• Alliteration
• Assonance
• Consonance
• Reverse rhyme
• Pararhyme
• Repetition

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4.2 Stress patterning

• Iamb 2 syllables, unstressed stressed
• Trochee 2 syllables, stressed unstressed
• Anapest 3 syllables, 2 unstressed stressed
• Dactyl 3 syllables, stressed 2 unstressed
• Spondee 2 stressed syllables
• Pyrrhic 2 unstressed syllables

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4.3 Metrical patterning

• Dimetre 2 feet
• Trimetre 3 feet
• Tetrametre 4 feet
• Pentametre 5 feet
• Hexametre 6 feet
• Heptametre 7 feet
• Octametre 8 feet

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4.4 Conventional forms of metre and sound

• Couplets 2 lines of verse, usually connected by
  a rhyme
• Quatrains Stanzas of four lines
• Blank verse lines in iambic pentametre which do
  not rhyme
• Sonnet
• Free verse
• Limericks etc.

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4.5 The poetic functions of sound and metre

• Aesthetic pleasure
• Conforming to a form
• Expressing/innovating with a form
• Demonstrating skill, intellectual pleasure
• For emphasis or contrast
• Onomatopoeia

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4.6 The analysis of poetry

• Info about the poem poet, period, genre, topic,
  etc.
• Structure layout, number of lines, length of
  lines, metre, rhymes, sound effects, etc. plus
• general comment on the poem

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5. The language of fiction

• From realism to modernism

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It had been an easy birth, but then for Abel and
Zaphia Rosnovski nothing had ever been easy, and
in their own ways they had both become
philosophical about that. Abel had wanted a son,
an heir who would one day be chairman of the
Baron Group. By the time the boy was ready to
take over, Abel was confident that his own name
would stand alongside those of Ritz and Statler
and by then the Baron would be the largest hotel
group in the world.
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Abel had paced up and down the colourless
corridor of St. Lukes Hospital waiting for the
first cry, his slight limp becoming more
pronounced as each hour passed. Occasionally he
twisted the silver band that encircled his wrist
and stared at the name so neatly engraved on it.
He turned and retraced his steps once again, to
see Doctor Dodek heading towards him.
Jeffrey Archer The Prodigal Daughter
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There is the Hart of the Wud in the Eusa Story
that wer a stage every 1 knows that. There is the
hart of the wood meaning the veryes deap of it
thats a nother thing. There is the hart of the
wood where they bern the chard coal thats a
nother thing agen innit. Thats a nother thing.
Berning the chard coal in the hart of the wood.
Thats what they call the stack of wood you see.
The stack of wood in the shape they do it for
chard coal berning. Why do they call it the hart
tho? Thats what this here story tels of.
Russell Hoban Ridley Walker
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5.1 Fictional prose and point of view

• I-narrators
• Third-person narrators
• Schema-oriented language
• Given vs New information
• Deixis

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5.2 Speech presentation

• Direct speech (DS)
• Free indirect speech (FIS)
• Indirect speech (IS)
• Narrators representation of speech acts (NRSA)
• Narrators representation of speech (NRS)

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5.3 Thought presentation

• Narrators representation of thought (NRT)
• Narrators representation of thought acts (NRTA)
• Indirect thought (IT)
• Free indirect thought (FIT)
• Direct thought (DT)
• Stream of consciousness

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5.4 Prose style

• ? Authorial style? Text style

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5.5 Analyzing the language of fiction

• Lexis/vocabulary
• Grammatical organization
• Textual organization
• Figures of speech
• Style variation
• Discoursal patterning
• Viewpoint manipulation

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6. The language of drama

• Drama as poetry
• Drama as fiction
• Drama as conversation

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6.1 Analyzing dramatic language

• Turn quantity and length
• Exchange sequence
• Production errors
• The cooperative principle
• Status marked through language
• Register
• Speech and silence

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6.2 Analyzing dramatic texts

• Paraphrasing
• Commentating
• Using theories