On Literary Creativity in the Discourse Dimension

Department of German Philology, B.B. Gorodovikov Kalmyk State University, 1-71, microdistrict 6, 358014, Elista, Russia

^* Corresponding author: nalya154@mail.ru

Abstract

The paper deals with the strategies of foregrounding and defamiliarization as the techniques of literary creativity. The strategy of foregrounding, which can be achieved either via deviation or parallelism, is typically conceived as the deviation from daily language, and is closely associated with novelty and aesthetic appreciation. Whereas defamiliarization is viewed as the technique focusing on the unusual setting, or unexpected angle of vision to make it foregrounded. After the survey of different views of the above-mentioned strategies, an attempt is made to verify that both strategies are used to indicate the turning points in the story. However, in contradistinction to discourse markers, they operate indirectly in literary discourse, creating stylistic effects on the phonetic, grammatical, or semantic levels. The results of the analysis conducted on the basis of short stories by English-speaking authors will be presented in order to demonstrate that both techniques are mostly applied to indicate conflict or complication in the story.