Foregrounding ENG 551 Lecture 13 Interpretation and Foregrounding

Foregrounding ENG 551 Lecture 13

Interpretation and Foregrounding What is interpretation? Action or process understanding the meaning and giving explanation to things and ideas which are complex or ambiguous. • To understand something. • To decide the meaning/purpose of something Gives clarity to ideas, reveals implications and symbolic meaning.

Interpretation & Foregrounding • What distinguishes literary discourse form ordinary discourse is the symbols, images, literary devices and other embellishments that a writer uses. • Our ordinary conversation is quite straightforward that we hardly need to interpret it. • But a literary piece makes some demands on part of the reader.

Interpretation & Foregrounding • A question mark accompanies each foregrounded feature. We ask what is the point? What does the writer want to convey through this particular feature? • A question mark accompanies each foregrounded feature. Consciously or unconsciously we ask what is the point? e. g. Knife : suppressed emotions (Virginia Woolf. “Mrs. Dalloway”) empty bucket: spiritual hollowness (Harold Pinter. “The Caretaker”)

When is a linguistic deviation artistically significant? • 1. When it communicates something: a) “My sun accompanied me through the journey” (spellings) b) “The morning comes to consciosness” (spellings) c) “Me goes” (grammar) Abnormalities in these examples are taken as errors, hindrances to communication.

When is a linguistic deviation artistically significant? • But unintentionally they convey quite a bit of meaning. e. g. about the education of the character/speaker, his imperfect command on language, printing error, proof reading mistake, or may be done intentionally by the writer to produce comic effects. “Even the most trivial and unmotivated deviation may communicate information.

• 2. When it communicates what is intended by the author: According to this definition deviation is significant only when it is deliberate. It excludes linguistic blunders e. g. malapropism. But the problem is that the intention of the author is often inaccessible. e. g. Harold Pinter the author of “The Caretaker” said he doesn’t want to give one meaning to his plays.

3. When it is judged by the reader to be significant: The significance of the text lies in the minds of the readers. Their interpretations are influenced by their experiences and knowledge. While reading we focus on literal, metaphoric and between the lines meanings. What words and details suggest that something more than literal meaning is intended.

Example: T. S. Eliot’s poems “We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Head-piece filled with straw” (The Hollow Men) “When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; (Prufrock)

• Words, images, rhythms, symbols are to be closely studied and interpreted. • The study of words, their placement and arrangement, the way in which they act and react on each other is all important. • Words beside their literal significance also have emotional, associative, and symbolic significance, and only close application and analysis can bring out their total meaning.

Some more examples • “My aunt suffers form terrible authoritis” • Like you plays? • The how of Commons • A deviation is significant when it is deleibrate. • We may further say that not only whether a deviation has a sensible interpretation, but what interpretation is to be given is a subjective matter.

• “Linguistics and literary criticism in so far as they deal with poetic language, are complementary not competing activities. Where the two meet is above all the study of foregrounding”. Geoffrey Leech A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry