The Theory Of Foregrounding And The Stylistic Analysis Of Fictional Prose

The foregrounding theory is one of the important theories in the field of stylistics. The present study aims to enhance the explanatory power of the foregrounding theory in stylistic analysis. An integrative mode consisting of author, text, and reader is proposed, and an application is followed to test its validity.This thesis first critically reviews the development of the foregrounding theory, with a focus on the theoretical contributions made by representative figures of different schools. By elaborating on their distinctiveness and relations of scholarly inheritance, the thesis first of all intends to present a holistic and historical development of the theory, and hopefully to lay a sound theoretical basis for the whole study.Foregrounding theory has its historical origin in Aristotle's Poetics, its roots in Russian Formalism, its elaboration in Prague School Structuralism, its further improvement in British Stylistics. At present, it is undergoing a pragmatic and psychological trend of development.Foregrounding is a mental process, which is realized through parallelism and deviation. Foregrounding functions as an important clue to a style; thus, the foregrounding theory has been widely applied to stylistic studies. In recent decades, as stylistic study further develops, the foregrounding theory has extended from linguistic level to supra-linguistic level. Therefore, the traditional stylistic theory of foregrounding, after enrichment and development, has acquired accumulated explanatory force.On the basis of a review of the historical development of the foregrounding theory, the present thesis explores an integrative mode that consists of three elements: the author, the text, and the reader for analysis of foregrounding features in literary stylistic study. According to the integrative mode, the foregrounding effect is achieved through the collaboration of the author, the text, and the reader. The author determines the direction of foregrounding, the text is the material realization of foregrounding, and the foregrounding effect is finally realized by the reader's active interpretation. Therefore, analysis of foregrounding features in literary stylistic study should follow three steps: author's determination with regard to the direction of foregrounding—textual analysis—reader's interpretation. Such a mode for literary stylistic analysis helps to make up for deficiencies in both pure intuitive appreciation and rigid formalistic analysis.The new mode is then applied to the stylistic analysis of foregrounding features in Fortress Besieged, a widely read and studied novel by Chien Chung-shu. The reason for selecting this novel as the text for analysis is that foregrounding, as a Western stylistic theory, has seldom been used in stylistic analysis of texts in Chinese, either literary or non-literary. The present thesis intends to investigate whether the foregrounding theory can be applied to analyze a text in Chinese. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to fill the research gap to a certain extent, to investigate the applicability of the foregrounding theory to stylistic analysis of texts in Chinese, and to test the validity of the new integrative mode. Such factors relevant to the direction of foregrounding in Fortress Besieged as Chien Chung-shu's view towards the theory of foregrounding and his understanding of metaphorical use of language are discussed; then a considerable section is devoted to presenting features of foregrounding at different levels of language, with the focus on foregrounding of metaphorical use of language; our interpretation of those foregrounding features accompanies as well.This study indicates that the theory of foregrounding is an effective explanatory instrument for stylistic analysis of texts in Chinese, and the integrative mode derived from it with author, text and reader as integrated components is feasible.