Coalition Abstract

One of the central goals of the empirical study of literature is to determine the nature and function of literary reading. In this, researchers often attribute a decisive role to foregrounding, a phenomenon that occurs either when some aspect of a text is either some form of repetition or unusual in terms of some general norm (external deviation) or deviating from a pattern set up by the text itself (internal deviation). For some, it is key to their understanding of what constitutes literariness, or even art in general. The aim of the foregrounding research coalition is to foster the empirical study of foregrounding, in order to enhance our understanding of what literariness is.

For this we need to distinguish four approaches to the ontology of foregrounding: (1) foregrounding seen as textual procedures (also referred to as deviations and parallelism); (2) foregrounding considered as a phenomenon occurring in the perception of readers (i.e., noticing that something is different in comparison to its context); (3) readers’ experience of foregrounding; and (4) the effects of such experiences in the culture at large. These four conceptions are interdependent and interactive, but only to a degree. To start with, readers will only perceive a deviation if the relevant information about context is available to them (e.g., their knowledge of genre conventions). And if perceived, there are still a number of factors that determine whether and how they interpret the intentionality and purpose of the deviation or parallelism and the whether they experience foregrounding in the sense of an aesthetic or distinctly literary response (e.g., readers’ attitude toward literary values). The research in this coalition focuses on the second and third approach. However, in our interdisciplinary group we will also consider the first, for instance in the formulation of hypotheses, and explore implications for the fourth.

Thus, our research coalition represents (and brings together) a wide range of topics, such as, reader variables that predict susceptibility to foregrounding; the way the interplay between deviation and parallelism affects responses; the relationship between backgrounding and foregrounding, the relation between foregrounding and perceived meaningfulness; foregrounding in other media than literary texts (e.g., film and music).

Author: Frank Hakemulder