Chapter NneAppreciation of E.E. Cummings Poetry from th.ppt

Chapter NineAppreciation of . Cummings Poetry from the Perspective of Foregrounding
1. Introduction to Cummings
in Poetry
3. Analysis of Cummings’ poem  “in Just-”
of “anyone lived in a pretty how town”
1. Introduction to Cummings
E. E. Cummings, poet and cubist painter, was the representative of American modern experimental poets. As a poet and painter, Cummings reflected the harmony of poems and paintings in his works, eschewing the conventional rhymes and syntactic structure of poems and even rejecting to transfer information and emotion in the way of conventional printing.
in Poetry
The term ‘foregrounding’ is borrowed by stylisticians from art criticism, which distinguishes between the foreground and the background of a painting. The theory of foregrounding is probably the most important theory within Stylistic Analysis, and foregrounding analysis is arguably the most important part of the stylistic analysis in poetry.
Leech’s Theory on Foregrounding
Foregrounding is realized by linguistic deviation and linguistic parallelism.

Foregrounding
Deviation Parallelism
Figure 1 The Realization of Foregrounding (Leech)
Leech divides deviation into eight types: lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, phonological deviation, graphological deviation, semantic deviation, dialectal deviation, deviation of register and deviation of historical period. Now we construct a new pattern of the realization of foregrounding.
Foregrounding
Deviation Overregularity
Phonology Graphology lexicon Grammar Meaning
Realization Form Semantics
Language
Figure 2 The Realization of Foregrounding
Figure 2 illustrates that the linguistic deviation and overregularity produce foregrounding. Linguistic deviation consists of lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, phonological deviation, graphological deviation and deviation of meaning. Linguistic overregularity includes phonological overregularity, lexical overregularity and