Foregrounding Spiritual Desolation through Deviation and Parallelism: A Stylistic Analysis of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

Abstract

T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925) is a seminal Modernist poem that reflects the spiritual disillusionment, moral paralysis, and existential uncertainty of the post-World War I period. While previous studies have explored its theological, philosophical, and intertextual aspects, less attention has been given to the linguistic techniques that shape these themes. This study examines the functions of linguistic deviation and parallelism as foregrounding devices in the stylistic construction of spiritual desolation in the poem. The analysis is based on Geoffrey Leech’s Foregrounding Theory, rooted in the Russian Formalist concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie). Using a qualitative stylistic approach, the poem is analyzed across semantic, lexical, grammatical, graphological, phonological, and syntactic levels. The findings show that semantic deviation, particularly through paradox and oxymoron, disrupts conventional meaning and conveys ontological emptiness. At the same time, syntactic and structural parallelism create repetitive patterns that foreground stagnation, incompletion, and immobility. Grammatical fragmentation, graphological irregularities, and phonological weakening further reinforce themes of spiritual exhaustion and communicative failure. The study concludes that the interaction of deviation and parallelism serves as the poem’s primary stylistic mechanism, transforming abstract despair into a concrete linguistic experience and demonstrating the effectiveness of foregrounding theory in Modernist stylistic analysis.