Abstract:

The main focus of this study is the stylistic analysis of Emily Dickinson’s Death poems; the poems echoing the feelings of sorrow and dejection. It will look for irregularities and unconventionalities in Dickenson’s poetry by pointing foregrounded deviation following the postmodern trend of the pursuit for meaning. According to Widdowson, ‘Stylistic is the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation” (Widdowson, 1975: 3). Style and Stylistics are important literary tools for the appreciation and study of literary texts. Stylistics as a manner of expression explains the choice and arrangement of the words, and their level of formality. It has been divided into several branches and theories. An important one among them is the model of foregrounding. The theory of foregrounding is the most powerful one in the literature. The term “foregrounding” is broader to the point that it resists definition. However, many stylisticians’ have attempted to define it. For example, Van Peer and Hakemulder (2006) say that the term refers to specific linguistic devices, i.e., deviation and parallelism that are used in literary texts in a functional and condensed way. Shen argues that this theory "assumes that poetic language deviates from norms characterized the ordinary use of language and that this deviation interferes with cognitive principles and processes to make communication possible." (2007: 169). Foregrounded deviations include; lexical, semantic, grammatical and phonological aspects in literary texts. (Leech, 1969: 42-52). Foregrounding is the de-familiarization of the text (Jeffries & McIntyre, 2010:31). Foregrounding deviations are one of the best and effective tools of stylistic analyses (Östman&Verschueren, 2011:296). It is a feature of literary texts that is 'amenable to careful and systematic empirical study' (Miall&Kuiken, 1994: 405) and gives expressiveness to texts. Foregrounding commonly studies repetition, parallelism, and deviations such as lexical, grammatical, graphological, phonological, semantic, register and historical deviations in literary texts (Leech, 1969: 42-52). It is the brining of particular textual features into prominence, for instance, distinct patterns, repetitions, parallelism and deviations, from general linguistic rules or from the style expected in a specific text type, genre, or context. The Foregrounding theory suggests that some parts of text have more effects on readers than the others. The style may be formal or informal, colloquial, subdued, rhetorical, terse, colourful, poetic or highly individual. It tells us about the Manner of expression, Choice of words and the structure of a sentence. This research is an effort to help readers discover the deviant meanings in the poems of Emily Dickenson. It will be argued with the application of stylistics that Dickinson’s poetry has a definite literal and figurative meaning. Dickinson has created a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. This study is an effort to make her style and poetry easy to appreciate for the common reader. An examination of the literature available on the topic suggests that no attempt has been made to examine/analyze the below mentioned poems in the light of foregrounding theory and this study therefore, intends to fill this gap.

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