Typographic foregrounding
Abstract
This article investigates the way in which devices of foregrounding play a role at the typographical level of a text's organisation. In poetry, such devices are very old and are regularly used in a bold way, thereby creating specific effects. However, a historical overview reveals that such bold typographic experiments are not distributed evenly over time. It also emerges that some of these texts survive in the literary canon, while others are forgotten. On the basis of an analysis of some test cases in literary history, hypotheses are proposed which may explain this uneven distribution. The discussion has also repercussions for issues of value in the study of literature.
... However, the organization of a poetic text enhances the salience of its components such as words, verses, and stanzas, facilitating affective-esthetic and cognitive processing (Schaffner et al., 2012). The distinctive visual form of a poem on a page or screen creates a unique perception-attention space for the reader (van Peer, 1993). Compared to prose, this space is more compact, well-structured, and optimally packaged for readers' working memory (Schrott & Jacobs, 2011). ...
... Our hypothesis regarding reading time suggested that both form and language would exert influence. The visual presentation of a poem on a screen was anticipated to enhance the clarity of its components, aiding cognitive processing (van Peer, 1993;Schaffner et al., 2012). Additionally, previous research has shown that L1 readers typically demonstrate shorter reading time compared to L2 readers (Chang, 2012;Grabe, 2008), a pattern we expected to observe in our study. ...
While much remains unexplored about what influences how poetry is perceived, this study investigates how themes, form, and language interact in poetry perception, shedding light on their effects on the reading responses of Chinese ESL learners. Findings showed: (1) Versified form and L1 poems were more comprehensible; (2) Idyll and L1 poems were perceived as having richer imagery; (3) Form and language interacted for rhythmicity, favoring L1 poems, especially the paragraphed L1 ones; (4) Language influenced perceived beauty, with L1 poems, especially love poems in versified form, rated as exceptionally beautiful; (5) Theme and language impacted perceived valence, with idyll and L2 poems being viewed more positively; form affected the perceived arousal, with versified poems rated as more exciting; (6) Form and language interacted, affecting reading time; versified L2 poems were read faster than paragraphed L1 and L2 poems. These findings hold significance for literary education and cross-cultural understanding.
... Theoretically, at the surface level, the distinctive graphic form of a poem on a printed page or screen will produce a special perception-attention space for and in the reader (cf. Van Peer, 1993). Compared to prose, this space is smaller, well-structured and offers linguistic information ideally packaged for readers' working memory (Schrott & Jacobs, 2011). ...
Following Jakobson and Levi-Strauss famous analysis of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Chats’ (‘The Cats’), in the present study we investigated the reading of French poetry from a Neurocognitive Poetics perspective. Our study is exploratory and a first attempt in French, most previous work having been done in either German or English (e.g., Jacobs, 2015a, 2018a, b; Müller et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2019). We varied the presentation mode of the poem Les Chats (verse vs. prose form) and measured the eye movements of our readers to test the hypothesis of an interaction between presentation mode and reading behavior. We specifically focussed on rhyme scheme effects on standard eye movement parameters. Our results replicate those from previous English poetry studies in that there is a specific pattern in poetry reading with longer gaze durations and more rereading in the verse than in the prose format. Moreover, presentation mode also matters for making salient the rhyme scheme. This first study generates interesting hypotheses for further research applying quantitative narrative analysis to French poetry and developing the Neurocognitive Poetics Model of literary reading (NCPM; Jacobs, 2015a) into a cross-linguistic model of poetry reading.
... It is interesting to note that poets and poetry publishers have since long experimented deliberately with presenting poems in different fonts. Typographic manipulations play a central role in the poetics of, for instance, Concrete Poetry [21] and Dadaism [22], while changes in font have occurred throughout literary history from Antiquity onwards [23]. In the case of modern Dutch poetry, which was used in the experiments reported in this article, the semantic effects of font manipulation as poetic device have been analyzed for various authors, such as the early 20 th -century avant-gardist Paul Van Ostaijen [24], De Stijl-artists like Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondriaan [25], and the postmodern poet Tonnus Oosterhoff [26]. ...
Previous research shows conflicting findings for the effect of font readability on comprehension and memory for language. It has been found that—perhaps counterintuitively–a hard to read font can be beneficial for language comprehension, especially for difficult language. Here we test how font readability influences the subjective experience of poetry reading. In three experiments we tested the influence of poem difficulty and font readability on the subjective experience of poems. We specifically predicted that font readability would have opposite effects on the subjective experience of easy versus difficult poems. Participants read poems which could be more or less difficult in terms of conceptual or structural aspects, and which were presented in a font that was either easy or more difficult to read. Participants read existing poems and subsequently rated their subjective experience (measured through four dependent variables: overall liking, perceived flow of the poem, perceived topic clarity, and perceived structure). In line with previous literature we observed a Poem Difficulty x Font Readability interaction effect for subjective measures of poetry reading. We found that participants rated easy poems as nicer when presented in an easy to read font, as compared to when presented in a hard to read font. Despite the presence of the interaction effect, we did not observe the predicted opposite effect for more difficult poems. We conclude that font readability can influence reading of easy and more difficult poems differentially, with strongest effects for easy poems.
... It is interesting to note that poets and poetry publishers have since long experimented deliberately with presenting poems in different fonts. Typographic manipulations play a central role in the poetics of, for instance, Concrete Poetry (21) and Dadaism (22), while changes in font have occurred throughout literary history from Antiquity onwards (23). In the case of modern Dutch poetry, which was used in the experiments reported in this article, the semantic effects of font manipulation as poetic device have been analyzed for various authors, such as the early 20 th -century avant-gardist Paul Van Ostaijen (24), De Stijl-artists like Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondriaan (25), and the postmodern poet Tonnus Oosterhoff (26). ...
Previous research shows conflicting findings for the effect of font readability on comprehension and memory for language. It has been found that - perhaps counterintuitively – a hard to read font can be beneficial for language comprehension, especially for more difficult language. Here we test how font readability influences the subjective experience of poetry reading. In three experiments we tested the influence of poem difficulty and font readability on the subjective experience of poems. We specifically predicted that font readability would have opposite effects on the subjective experience of easy versus difficult poems. Participants read poems which could be more or less difficult in terms of conceptual or structural aspects, and which were presented in a font that was either easy or more difficult to read. Participants read existing poems and subsequently rated their subjective experience (overall liking, perceived flow of the poem, perceived topic clarity, and perceived structure). In line with previous literature we observed a Poem Difficulty x Font Readability interaction effect for subjective measures of poetry reading. We found that participants rated easy poems as less nice when they were presented in a hard to read font, as compared to when presented in an easy to read font. Despite the presence of the interaction effect, we did not observe the predicted opposite effect for more difficult poems. We conclude that font readability can influence reading of easy and more difficult poems differentially, with strongest effects for easy poems.
... [41] Whether it is operating on a lexico-grammatical, semantic, syntactic, graphological, contextual, genre and/or cognitive level, foregrounding is subject to repetition, unusualness, frequency and the manipulation of linguistic and stylistic rules. [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] When an element or object is foregrounded it is afforded 'heightened psychological attention' [50], the effects of which on the reader can range from aesthetic appreciation of word choice, turn of phrase and so on, to attitudinal and emotive changes whereby foregrounded elements alter the reader's perception of the 'storyworld'. [51,49] Leech describes its two key facets: 'formally, foregrounding is a deviation, or departure, from what is expected in the linguistic code or the social code expressed through language; functionally, it is a special effect or significance conveyed by that departure.' ...
Literature can offer a wealth of information about epilepsy: from complex narratives to children’s picture books, it can help broaden people’s understanding, show what it is like to live with epilepsy and provide a medium to which people with epilepsy (PWE) can relate. The latter being particularly important in such cases where seizure experiences are highly subjective, such as those associated with ‘focal seizures’, a common seizure type, which are known for their variable and hard-to-describe symptoms, causing complications with diagnosis as many of the symptoms overlap with those of other psychological health conditions.
Literature, however, has more to offer than acting as a source for demystifying epilepsy. On a disciplinary level, literature is surrounded by different frameworks for linguistic analysis which, importantly, are also applicable to real-life discourse. In particular, the well-established discipline, cognitive stylistics, provides ample theory for analysing the different facets of literature, from narratological and storyworld level, to the intricacies of characterisation revealing the structure behind the presentation of fictional characters’ experiences, attitudes and personalities. Such methods have the potential to transform and decode complex, subjective experiences into manageable pieces of information. This, then, holds great potential for shedding light on the experiences of real-life seizure narratives to the extent that the identified seizure’s linguistic ‘profiles’ can be used to aid real-life situations. Therefore, the present study calls to attention the potential evoked through the convergence between literature, linguistic analysis, fictional characters, PWE and seizure narratives. Extrapolating the qualities of these converging strands can enrich our understanding of the seizure experience, as well as bring to awareness the areas of risk that surround aspects of the diagnosis process.
Poetry originates in social orality: music and voice are fundamental for the way it functions. Important are both the emotional ingredients in poetry as an experience (van Peer and Chesnokova, Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics, London, Bloomsbury, 2022) and the oral and social nature of its delivery. Reading a poem means first and foremost experiencing it through our auditory senses, and in the distant past all literature was public, meant to be performed aloud, memorized and recited. The ancient Greeks listened to the Iliad while the singer accompanied himself on the lyre. It was only in the eighteenth century that the silent reading of literature became more common. Since then, most poetry has been confronted privately, with less involvement of the auditory sense.
Nowadays, however, we are witnessing a return to the original oral and public nature of poetry, as seen in its widespread distribution over the internet and the massive participation, both live and online, in slam festivals. As evidenced by YouTube views, and social media in general, poetry is being widely consumed and savored, but no longer in the private way. However, we remain largely unaware of whether reading a poem silently or hearing it read aloud makes any difference in how we understand the text or in how it affects us emotionally.
To investigate this question, this chapter will present the results of two experiments, in which respondents read the same poems (both traditional and modernist) aloud or in silence. We then probed their cognitive, aesthetic, emotional, social, musical and sensual reactions, using a Likert scale. The statistically significant differences between the groups highlight some differences between auditory and visual senses in encountering poetry.
Although audiovisual translation (AVT) has received considerable attention in recent years, evidence suggests that there is a paucity of empirical research carried out on the dubbing of wordplay in the Arabophone countries. This piece of research sets to identify, describe and assess the most common translation techniques adopted by translators when dubbing English-language animated films into Arabic. The focus is on the special case of dubbing Disney animated films into Egyptian Arabic (EA) and their subsequent redubbing into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), during the 1975-2015 period. The ultimate goal is to ascertain the similarities as well as the differences that set the two versions apart, particularly when it comes to the transfer of wordplay. To reach this objective, the methodological approach adopted for this study is a corpus of instances of wordplay that combines a quantitative phase, which has the advantage of identifying correlations between the types of wordplay and particular translation techniques and results and is then followed by a qualitative analysis that further probes the results and determines the different factors that contribute to the way wordplay is translated. The analysis reveals that, in their attempt to render this type of punning humour, in both Arabic dubbed versions, Arabic translators resort to a variety of translation techniques, namely, loan, direct translation, explication, paraphrase, substitution and omission. The examination of the data shows that achieving a humorous effect in the target dialogue is the top priority and driving factor influencing most of the strategies activated in the process of dubbing wordplay into EA. Dissimilarly, there is a noticeable lower amount of puns crossing over from the original films to the MSA dubbed versions, highlighting the fact that the approach generally taken by the dubbing teams seems to give priority to the denotative, informative dimension rather than the socio-pragmatic one. By shedding light on the intricacies of dubbing, it is hoped that this study would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the translation of wordplay in the Arabophone countries and, more specifically, in the field of dubbing children’s programmes.
Bu çalışmanın amacı, Malcolm Lowry’nin Under the Volcano adlı romanına damga vuran ve Konsolos olarak anılan başkarakterin zihinsel biçeminin 1974 ve 1989 yıllarında yapılan iki Türçe çeviriye nasıl aktarıldığını incelemektir. Bu nedenle, çalışmada, yazın metinlerindeki dil kullanımlarını bilişsel süreçlerin ışığında ele alan bilişsel biçembilim temel alınarak, zihinsel biçem kavramının çeviribilim için önemi vurgulanmaktadır. Bu bağlamda, başkarakterin zihinsel biçemini öne çıkaran diyaloglar ve serbest dolaylı anlatımların roman ve çevirilerde incelenmesi ile birlikte, çevirilerde yapılan biçemsel tercihlere ışık tutulmaktadır. Çalışmada, ayrıca, incelenen eserin modernist roman özelliklerini taşıması nedeniyle, çevirilerin yapıldığı yıllarda Türk yazın dizgesinde modernist roman türünün durumu mercek altına alınmaktadır. Sonuç olarak, iki çeviride de -birbirinden farklı düzeylerde de olsa- kaynak metnin biçemsel özelliklerinin gözetildiği, ancak başkahramanın zihinsel biçeminden kaynaklanan anlatım bozukluklarının ve anlam bütünlüğünü bozan ifadelerin erek metnin okunabilirliğini tümüyle olumsuz etkilediği durumlarda düzeltildiği gözlemlenmiştir.
This chapter minutely describes the model that subtitles the book, enabling other scholars to apply it consistently. The skeleton of the model rests on an intuitive distinction between RIDs (Readerly Indicators of Difficulty) and LIDs (Linguistic Indicators of Difficulty). Within an experimental setting, these may be conceived of as the two global variables of difficulty. RIDs are, for instance, statements of rejection, longer reading times and markers of interpretive hesitation. A total of thirty-three LIDs are identified and discussed, ranging from orthography to discourse (e.g. misspelt words, syntactic ambiguity and lack of narrativity). Prototypical effects are suggested for each LID based on the processing operations they are most likely to challenge. This implies that the model allows to predict readerly reactions based on linguistic description.
The present paper explores the effect of a specific textual device, i.e. metrical structure, on the reception of a text. Two hypotheses were tested, one bearing on the assumed ‘aesthetic’, the other on the mnemonic effect of metre. To this end, two versions of a poem, one metrical, the other non-metrical, were distributed randomly among readers, after which they were asked to respond to semantic differential scales and to memory tasks. The results show that the hypotheses must be upheld. The metrical structure clearly enhanced aesthetic pleasure experienced in reading the text, while it also heightened readers' ability to recognize the correct phrasings from amongst a group of distractors. The results provide empirical evidence for the theoretical claim that the reading experience is a function of - amongst other things - the text's linguistic structure.
Studies in literacy, family, culture and the state: an introduction Preface 1. The word of God 2. The word of mammon 3. The state, the bureau and the file 4. The letter of the law 5. Ruptures and continuities Notes Bibliography Index.
This paper proposes that theory construction in the area of stories must distinguish between theories of plan comprehension, theories of narrative comprehension, and theories of the story schema. Evidence is provided which suggests that a number of theoretical and empirical findings that have been taken to contribute to theories of the story schema are better interpreted as relating to plan comprehension and narrative comprehension. The paper suggests that theory evaluation in this area must take into account the discourse force of the genre being investigated. The authors propose that stories are a subclass of narratives that have entertainment as their primary discourse force. Finally, a structural-affect theory is outlined and evidence is given to suggest that this theory gives a partial account of the reader's story schema.
Continuity and change in Russian Formalism
- D W Fokkema
A Biblical pattern poem
- M Halle