Famous and Fuzzy

Research on readers' reception of foregrounding is one of the major domains in empirical literary studies, but has so far often produced uncertain or indistinct results.This article intends to show that this is due to the fact that in the course of its long and changeful history, foregrounding, though widely acclaimed, developed into a fuzzy concept.Tracing its history from Shklovsky's notion of foregrounding as (mainly) a perceptive effect through the Prague Structuralists' spatialization, textualization and generalization of the concept to its further elaboration and systematization by various British Stylisticians, the article discusses apparent inconsistencies and fallacies in foregrounding theory.It is postulated that in the future, foregrounding should not be assigned too many fixed functions beyond its attention-drawing effect, that the schemata to which it refers ought to be specified, and that foregrounded regularity and foregrounded irregularity should be treated as two different categories.The article finally looks at five exemplary empirical studies of foregrounding, exposing how widespread indifference to the aforementioned problems has affected their results.It is demanded that rather than measuring foregrounding in a 'holistic' approach, empirical studies should look at single, local instances of foregrounding that are linguistically well defined.The article concludes with a list of seven principles which may serve as a useful point of reference and guideline for future research in this field.