ParallelismStylistics 551

Lecture 19

Foregrounding through Parallelism

Foregrounding is a means of strengthening literature. Foregrounding is achieved by two ways " Deviation" and " Parallelism". Deviation is turning aside from a said norm or grammatical rule while parallelism is repetition of sound, structure, word or idea.What a man, Is he a man.( G.B. Shaw)( Parallelism)Ten thousands saw I at a glance.( Wordsworth)( Deviation)I kissed thee ear I killed thee, where .( Shakespeare)( Parallelism )Foregrounding is to bring something into light and to make work of art eye catching,  forceful and presentable. In short it is the backbone of literature.

Parallelism as foregrounding• In explanation, Mukařovský posited that literature

is a process of "making strange " whereby the world or a perspective is presented in a manner that separates it from real life experience through literary devices that manipulate variables to set literary experience apart from real experience, thus making it unfamiliar. This stands in stark contrast to classical theory stating literature reflects real life experience of the world and how it operates.

Parallelism as Foregrounding • The purpose of foregrounding is to sharpen readers' vision

and understanding of the events, feelings, circumstances, concepts, etc. that the author wants to point out in the hope of giving readers new clarity, epiphany or motivation etc. The favored techniques for creating foregrounding are patterns, such as repetitions; ambiguity, in which meaning is clear but conclusions may be variable; metaphor; tone; parallelism; and diction. Structural elements may also be foregrounded, such as character development and plot structure. Any of these devices may be used to defamiliarize the literary work through linguistic dislocation (i.e., atypical language usage) so that the reader is struck by the author's points and aims while submerged in a "strange" perspective of life and the world.

Examples

1. What exactly is parallel in the following structures? • No news is good news. • Finders keepers, losers weepers. 2. Out of sight out of mind.• What is the meaning connection between the

words ‘sight’ and ‘mind’? • Two is company three is a crowd • How about ‘company’ and ‘crowd’?

• In the proverb Out of sight, out of mind, the parallel structure functions on the syntactic and on the lexical level (the same grammatical structure is used: a prepositional phrase followed by a noun; moreover, the prepositional phrase is repeated, therefore there is lexical parallelism as well). This foregrounds the opposition between Sight and Mind and forces us to create a meaning connection between the two, and then interpret them as similar.

• In Two is company, three is a crowd, parallelism is again grammatical and lexical (subject expressed through a numeral + link verb + noun), with a slight dissimilarity in the use of the indefinite article (because Company is uncountable). The parallel structure highlights Company and Crowd as opposites, with company having positive, pleasant connotations, and Crowd on the contrary, unpleasant ones – thus suggesting that the presence of a third person ruins the intimacy between the first two.

• From the above examples, you can infer what Michal Short calls ‘the parallelism processing rule’: when parallel structures are present, look for either opposite or similar meaning in the parallel parts (keep in mind that this rule applies most of the time, but not always, so it is not to be taken as an absolute must).

How does parallelism function in the following proverbs?

• Where there is no trust, there is no love. • Where there’s a will there’s a way. • In literature, parallelism functions in similar ways. For

instance, the last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 154, “Love's fire heats water, water cools not love”, makes use of grammatical and lexical parallelism to explore the meaning relationship between fire and love. The first half of the line refers to Cupid’s torch heating up a well, the second to the lover coming up to the magic well to find a cure for love, and not succeeding. Initially love and fire are associated; but the parallel structure actually reverses this relationship, suggesting that love and fire have become antonyms, and that love is far stronger than fire.

Features of Parallelism

• Identity and contrastRoman Jakobson: “Any form of parallelism is an apportionment of invariants and variable”In other words in any parallelistic pattern there must be an element of identity and contras.

Identity and contrast:

• The element of identity requires little comment. It is clear that any superimposed pattern sets up a relation of equivalence between two or more neighboring pieces of a text

• as in “the furrow followed free” • And “where wealth accumulates and men decay”

• What is significant is that this identity does not extend to absolute duplication or the exact repetition of words as in a chant “We want Alf! We want Alf!”

• Because parallelism requires some variable feature of the pattern—some contrasting element which are parallels with respect to their position in the pattern.

Example: Emily Dickinson

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,

The one the other will includeThe brain is deeper than the sea,

For, hold them, blue to blue,The one the other will absorb,

As sponges, buckets doThe brain is just the weight of God,

For, lift them, pound for pound, And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.

• Beauty is truth, truth beauty,• That is all ye know on earth• And all ye need to know (Keats)

• Love so alike, no season knows nor clime,• Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of

time. (Donne)

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.(Dickens)