foregrounding

foregrounding, giving unusual prominence to one element or property of a text, relative to other less noticeable aspects. According to the theories of Russian Formalism, literary works are special by virtue of the fact that they foreground their own linguistic status, thus drawing attention to how they say something rather than to what they say: poetry ‘deviates’ from everyday speech and from prose by using metre, surprising metaphors, alliteration, and other devices by which its language draws attention to itself. See also defamiliarization, literariness.