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surface level features which may be "consciously
controlled by the artist for esthetic effect" (Wittig,
1975, p. 15).2 The methodology draws upon the
linguistics-oriented criticism of Russian Formalism,
Structuralism and Stylistics, particularly the concepts
of foregrounding, repetition, juxtaposition, selfreflexive
narrative, Victor Shklovsky's
"defamiliarization,n Joseph Frank's "spatial form," and
the writings of Stephen Ullman and Robert Scholes.
Joseph Frank speculates that "an increase of
interest in man's subjective and emotional life, when
translated into terms of literary form, automatically
seems to lead to an increase in the spatialization of
narrative ••• " (Frank, 1981, p. 240), and certainly the
inward-looking works of the Urdu Modernists, like those
of modernist writers in the West, are more readily
2Wittig divides structuralists into those who
follow Levi-Strauss in searching for deep structures and
those who are more influenced by the Russian Formalists
and who work with surface structures under the conscious
control of the author (Susan Wittig. Rtructuralism: An
Interdisciplinary Study. Pittsburgh: The Pickwick Press,
1975, p. 15). It should be noted that Fowler makes the
same distinction, but limits structuralism to a concern
with deep structure and defines surface structure as the
domain of stylistics (Roger Fowler, Ed. Style and
Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics.
Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1975, p. 11.)