DeviationStylistics ENG 551

Lecture 14

Deviation

• This topic is all about how and why writers FOREGROUND parts of their texts and what meanings and effects are associated with these foregroundings. 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 of any text.

Deviation & Parallelism in Foregrounding• One way to produce foregrounding in a text, then, is

through linguistic deviation. Another way is to introduce extra linguistic patterning into a text. The most common way of introducing this extra patterning is by repeating linguistic structures more often than we would normally expect to make parts of texts PARALLEL with one another. So, for example, if you look at the last three sentences of the previous paragraph you should feel that they are parallel to one another. They have the same overall grammatical structure (grammatical parallelism) and some of the words are repeated in identical syntactic locations.

Linguistic Deviation and Linguistic Parallelism

Produce the effect of

FOREGROUNDING

• Deviation occurs when we have a set of rules or expectations which are broken in some way. Like the way this font has just changed. This deviation from expectation produces the effect of foregrounding, which attracts attention and aids memorability.

In most of the instances the deviation will be linguistic. But foregrounding is a psychological phenomenon, not a linguistic one. This is why the linguistic structure of texts can affect meaning and effect. Linguistic phenomena can have related psychological effects for readers of texts.

Example

• Dylan Thomas wrote a poem which has a title which breaks both of the rules we noticed on the last page, and so is doubly foregrounded - it is grammatically and semantically deviant at the same time. The poem is called 'A Grief Ago', a phrase which also turns up in the poem itself.

• How exactly is “a grief ago deviant” ?

• What can you infer about the meaning of the phrase form the character of deviation ?

Example

Ana- {Mary} gram {Army}

How well her name an Army doth present,In whom the Lord of Hosts did pitch his tent!

from The Temple, by George Herbert

Deviation

• A linguistic deviation is a disruption of the normal process of communication: it leaves a gap, as it were, in one’s comprehension of text. The gap can be filled, and the deviation rendered significant. But only if by an effort of imagination the reader perceives some deeper connection which compensates for the superficial oddity. In case of a metaphor this compensation is in the form of an analogy.

Example: Deviation through metaphor Then thy sick taper will begin to winkIt contains two violations of literal meaningfulness: • the idea of taper being sick and the idea of taper

being able of winking. We appreciate analogies between someone who is ill and a candle which is burning out,

• And between the flickering of a candle and the batting of and eyelid.

• We can ask how these comparisons contribute to the total effectiveness of the poem.

• Another kind of deviation is illustrated in bizarre word-blends and neologisms of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, e.g.

• Museyroom, wholeborrow, Gracehoper.• We attempt to match this linguistic connection

(actually a phonological resemblance) between the inverted word and one or more established items of vocabulary.

• Museum, wheelbarrow, grasshopper

• The second is to match this linguistic connection with some connection outside language. Perhaps some referential connection between the invented words and the proper words we map on them. Thus museyroom suggests, appropriately enough, that a museum is a room in which one muses, just as authoritis in “ My aunt suffers form terrible authoritis” might suggest a writing bug which afflicts my aunt as cripplingly as arthritis.