In the past, several studies have found empirical support for the psychological notion of foregrounding. In this paper we will present the results of a reading experiment investigating descriptive and evaluative reader reactions to a poem, both in its original form (containing rather heavy foregrounding, both deviation and parallelism) and a version (from which all foregrounding has been removed). In this sense the research presents a replication of earlier experiments as well as a comparison with some more recent ones that failed to find empirical evidence for the notion of foregrounding. It will also cast light on Bortolussi and Dixon’s rereading paradigm.
The results will be combined with a reconsideration of the concept of literariness, which will be confronted with the variety within a reader population, as well as with the diversity within a text corpus. The latter will be confronted with Van Peer’s (1991) effort to develop a descriptive definition of literature, incorporating the heterogeneous nature of the corpus of texts that are regarded as literary. Revisiting these aspects of texts and their reception may illuminate persistent problems in the theory of literariness
