Teaching stylistics through E. E. Cummings poetry

Abstract

Teaching stylistics is both enchanting and challenging. Many students come to stylistics having studied English and American literature, but it demands a very different set of skills. Analyzing a text stylistically is unlike doing a 'literary' analysis, as it needs to be much more objective and rooted in fact. The main aim of a stylistics analysis is to explain how the literary structure of a text creates the feelings and responses that we get when we read it. I have chosen E. E Cummings poetry since it is considered as interesting as tricky at the same time. One of the most important stylistics techniques used there is foregrounding and, moreover internal foregrounding. Foregrounding refers to a form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically for literary-aesthetic purposes. The aim of this paper is to introduce a model of a stylistics analysis as already being discussed with the students who I teach stylistics. We will focus on the results we reached by the use of the interesting techniques of foregrounding and inner foregrounding