Intertextuality as parallelism in two South African poems

Abstract

This article attempts a refinement of the notion of foregrounding as it functions in poetic language through sound repetition. Phonic foregrounding is viewed not only from the vantage point of the organisation of the individual text, or the oeuvre of a particular poet, as foregrounded against the background of the ordinary usage of sound in everyday speech, but also from the point of view that the text is part of a larger literary and social discourse. In analysing and interpreting the functional organisation of sound in two Afrikaans poems, principles for the study of intertextuality put forward by van Peer (1987) are examined and revised to include phonic foregrounding as a potential factor in establishing intertextual relationships.