Parallelism: A Not-So-New Perspective

Roman Jakobson, patriarch of literary linguistics, stylistics, and structural poetics, conceptualised parallelism in ways far more technical and sophisticated than how biblical scholars have applied the term to biblical Hebrew poetry. Parallelism, according to Jakobson, is much more than the mere repetitious and patterned stacking of words and grammatical constructions across poetic discourse. Furthermore, parallelism has two particular functions in poetic discourse. First, through repetition marked by subtle deviation, parallelism functions as a backgrounding device against which foregrounding (i.e. forms) can emerge via defamiliarisation. Second, parallelism also functions as the defamiliarising device through pattern-disrupting combinations of linguistics structures. In conclusion, poetic discourse analysis of parallelism as having a dual rhetorical function of both backgrounding and foregrounding reveals the probability that especially disruptive types of parallelism (unexpected combinations) function as macro-structural delineation markers.