Word: foregrounds
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SHORT STORIES ARE BEST when the background can be assumed and the foreground is fleshed out. Henry James, obsessed with inner life to a degree unhealthy for a writer using this form, allowed his short pieces to balloon into "nouvelles", because the psychological world he described in The Turn of the Screw or The Beast in the Jungle was uncharted in the 1890s. He could assume little knowledge and less sympathy on the part of his audience, and thus created his world painstakingly...
...contrast, the characters in the Freshman Register seem, at first glance, to be clearly in the foreground. The invisible bureaucrats and administrators of Rules Relating had neither faces nor identities; this slim volume provides both, for nearly 1500 freshmen. And as much as Rules Relating and Courses of Instruction, this is a book with a purpose, a function that far outweighs its stylistic merits. Given, say, the name of a freshman, one can quickly determine where he lives, where he prepped and what field he intends to concentrate his college studies, and one can also get a reasonable idea...
...Obsessed. Hicks painted such scenes over and over-there are some 60 known versions. While the peaceful animals dominate the foreground, Penn usually appears in the distance, negotiating with Indian chiefs. This portrait of Penn and the Indians actually derived from Benjamin West's painting of the same scene more than 50 years earlier. But simple reality meant little to Hicks-he was a man obsessed with his Utopia. Sometimes Hicks places this Utopia in an imaginary place, sometimes at Virginia's Natural Bridge (which Hicks never saw but adopted from an engraving), or the Delaware Water...
Nowhere is the sin of conspicuousness committed more outrageously than among women writers. In the fictive worlds they create and in the act of their own writing, they put women in the foreground--acts of deviance, therefore conspicuous, and acts of defiance, therefore political. Spacks's excellent book, The Female Imagination--by far the most comprehensive treatment of women writers to date--examines this highly suspect group of women, In so doing, it unavoidably concerns itself with power because that is what the female imagination ponders: how to combat the external powers constraining...
...look to characterize a specific family, but rather to characterize the sprawl and variety of family life. Figures at both ends of the frame are cut off and those within are arranged haphazardly. Each is involved in his own world, not the photographer's. A baby near the foreground is blurred by motion; most of the others seem lost in contemplation and stare blankly in different directions. Yet there is a unity: the paradoxical combination of wide diversity of attention and easy physical proximity, make the photograph an unmistakeable account of a family, not of individuals...