Contents Introduction I. Cognitive principle of foregrounding in the literary texts

1.3. Foregrounding and Literary response
Readers thus notice foregrounded passages in literary texts: They take longer to read such passages, they find them striking, and they rate them as affectively involving. From the evidence of our own and previous studies, it is possible to put together a sketch of the interpretive processes that are distinctive to literary response. First, it seems clear that most readers, though aware that they are reading a literary text, attempt to understand the text using prototypic concepts: This enables the text to be located within some existing domain of the reader's understanding. A bottom-up process of word and sentence interpretation takes place, with several prototypic propositions being activated, much as Kintsch's (1988) model suggests. At the same time, however, responses to foregrounded passages challenge the adequacy of readers' immediate, prototypic understandings. The feelings engaged in response to foregrounding guide alternative interpretations: These feelings offer an avenue to a rich set of alternative meanings which may be more persuasive than the prototypic propositional structure. Even if not immediately persuasive, readers may gradually begin to relate passages that offer a similar feeling, perhaps as a result of the recurring patterns of foregrounding that are found throughout the text (termed parallelism by Jakobson, 1987, p. 82). Thus, the reader begins to anticipate the likely meaning of the text. At first that meaning may be present only as an imprecise feeling, but, as it becomes more defined, it will go beyond any of the prototypic conceptions that initially were applied (see Miall, 1989, 1990, for more detailed accounts; cf. Meutsch & Schmidt, 1985, who refered to changes in "frames of reference"). As mentioned earlier, we propose that the generality of readers' response to foregrounding is comparable to the generality of the types of response (elaboration, etc.) proposed by text theories. Although this issue requires further empirical study, Van Peer (1986, p. 120) provided evidence that readers' sensitivity to foregrounding is independent of literary training or experience: His readers noted the presence of foregrounding in poetry, whether they had obtained academic training in stylistics or had received no university level instruction in literature. Although readers generally may notice stylistic variations, it seems likely that they vary in sensitivity to such kinesthetic components of style as phonemic and metrical effects, or certain metaphoric features (cf. Lakoff, 1987). Individual differences such as occur in visual or aural imagery are also likely to exist here. Nonetheless, we expect that readers generally respond affectively to a literary text, because foregrounding often occurs in a highly clustered form: A given passage will contain features at all three levels (phonemic, grammatical, and semantic). Thus, for instance, a reader who is relatively insensitive to the kinesthetic aspects of phonemic foregrounding may still be quite sensitive to the kinesthetic features of certain metaphors. It is also likely that, across longer sequences of a literary text, readers respond cumulatively to features that they would not be able to recognize singly. As Coleridge (1817/1983) noted⁷