A Study Of Foregrounding In The New Yorker Stories From The Stylistic Perspective

As an important concept and category in stylistic study, foregrounding has received great attention of western scholars. The collision between subjects developed the concept from a western painting concept to an important means of stylistic analysis. Foregrounding research has experienced various schools, and gradually formed a more mature theoretical framework. Until now, foregrounding has already become an important means of stylistic analysis. Domestic researches about foregrounding began in 1960 s has formed a mature system after decades of development.Ann Beattie is a famous American short story writer. She and Raymond Carver are both known for minimalism masters. She is one of the main writers of The New Yorker magazine. Her works has been regarded as the spiritual portrayal of the urban American generation. According to the existing data, few people have analyzed The New Yorker Stories from the perspective of stylistics, and other research aspects of this book are not comprehensive.This thesis tries to analyze the foregrounding features of Ann Beattie's The New Yorker Stories from the stylistic perspective. It will discuss the functions of foregrounding features of this book by studying its deviation features in the lexical level, the graphological level and the semantical level; and its over-regularity features in repetition and parallelism. By studying, this thesis draws the following conclusions: 1.The application of foregrounding features in literary works can strengthen the dynamic interaction among the readers, authors and works. 2.The foregrounding features in the literary works can help produce aesthetic effect.