ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSE BBI 2409
Assignment 1
A survey of recent empirical studies of literary comprehension shows that little attention has been paid to the effects of literary style, often known as foregrounding. Yet a long tradition in literary theory, from Aristotle, Horace, and Quintilian, through the British Romantic writers, to the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle, has emphasised that stylistic features are characteristic of literary texts. Recent theorists, on the other hand, have tended either to ignore or dismiss this possibility (Fish, 1980, pp. 68-96; Halász, 1989; Schmidt, 1982, p. 90). Similarly, investigators of prose comprehension, some of whom have taken an interest in literary texts, have focused on cognitive aspects of meaning representation (Van Dijk, 1979) or on affective aspects of narrative content (Brewer and Lichtenstein, 1982; Hidi and Baird, 1986) independently of style (Miall and Kuiken, 1994). However, if foregrounding is characteristic of literary texts, it should be possible to obtain empirical evidence of its effects on readers. In this paper we review some theoretical reasons for examining foregrounding, and point to several recent investigations of how foregrounding influences readers' reactions. We then report four studies that examined the relationship between foregrounding and responses to literary short stories.
Source;
Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect Response to Literary Stories
By
David S. Miall & Don Kuiken
University of Alberta
( Taken From Website: http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/foregrd.htm )
Part Of Speech
Empirical - Adjective
Literary - Adjective
Comprehension - Noun
Attention - Noun
Romantic - Adjective
Characteristic - Adjective
Possibility - Noun
Affective - Adjective
Representation - Noun
Narrative - Adjective
The Meaning/Definition Of Each Word
Empirical - em•pir•ic•al adj. [usually before noun] based...