Week 3: Stylistic Foregrounding

"Foregrounding is essentially a technique for 'making strange' in language, or to extrapolate from Shklovsky's Russian term ostranenie, a method of 'defamiliarisation' in textual composition. ... Whether the foregrounded pattern deviates from a norm, or whether it replicates a pattern through parallelism, the point of foregrounding as a stylistic strategy is that it should acquire salience in the act of drawing attention to itself," (Simpson 2004).

This section explains in detail the concept of foregrounding and its two devices/principles i.e. 'deviation and parallelism'.

Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2004.

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