Foregrounding In "Sailing To Byzantium": A Cognitive Stylistic Perspective

Foregrounding theory is one of the most important literary theories in the west.Over centuries, scholars have provided nearly exhaustive researches on its stylisticfeatures in literary reading while the reception of reader has been largely overlooked.In this study, with a view of cognitive stylistics, the author decides to cast more lighton readers’ response to foregrounding.Starting from a critical review of representative figures of different schools,this study first of all intends to recapture the process of development offoregrounding theory, which in turn can help us figure out its theoretical trend.The theoretical built-up subsequently leads us to ponder over questions that howreaders respond to the foregrounded features and how those foregrounded elementsrefresh readers’ ideas and help them echo with the original author. With the aid ofcognitive stylistic theory, one model that reveals foregrounding process is firstlyproposed. So far as this paper is concerned, foregrounding causes defamiliarization,defamiliarization evokes feelings, and feelings guide refamiliarization interpretativeefforts. The author believes that such a model for foregrounding study can help tomake up for deficiencies in both pure intuitive literary appreciation and rigidlinguistic analysis.After the theoretical explication, the model proposed is applied in the analysis of“Sailing to Byzantium”, a poem written by Yeats. In this part, the analysis followsthe procedure of description, interpretation and evaluation. In the process oflinguistic analysis, special attention is given to phonological foregrounding,syntactic foregrounding and semantic foregrounding.With theoretical illustration and practical application, the present author foundthat reading is largely a dynamic process characterized by readers’ response andidentification. The psychological process that a reader undergoes when encounteringforegrounding conforms to the sequence of defamiliarization and refamiliarizationconnected by the vehicle of feeling.In the above process, feeling plays a constructive role: In the case of remembered feeling, feeling could enhance boundary crossingand aesthetically enhanced boundary crossing is self-implicating; in the case of freshfeeling, feeling has a modifying power, enabling readers to refamiliarize with theforegrounded part in literature by means of perspective shift.Hopefully, this cognitive stylistic approach towards foregrounding in literaryanalysis could initiate more studies in the similar vein and find more applications inthe near future.