Parallelism in E.E. Cummings’ poetry: The research of foregrounding

Abstract

Following the introduction of the ideas of Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, the foregrounding theory appeared as a new paradigm, based on linguistic models that claimed to provide insight into poetic technique and gain a grasp of the effects generated by this technique in the readers. Thus the article focuses on the analysis of stylistic tools to create the foregrounding effect in the poems by E. E. Cummings. The famous American poet, essayist, playwright and painter, he is famous for his very special style of writing and poetic innovations as he skilfully used various types of foregrounding in his poems, and therefore attracted scholarly attention. Hence, in this article the authors offer the outline of theoretical background of foregrounding research as they systematize different approaches to research in the area. On a practical note, the article details the issue of linguistic parallelism as a way to create the foregrounding effect. The authors hold that parallelism can occur at different language levels: morphological, phonological, syntactic, grammatical and lexical. In E.E. Cummings’s poems it is predominantly created by means of anaphora, epistrophe, asyndeton and parallel constructions per se and is in itself a powerful tool to generate an effect on readers