About the Book
This book explores the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of examplesDLlyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith WhartonDLnine of the ten essays are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as a broad framing perspective and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final essay, by Deirdre Wilson,
co-founder (with Dan Sperber) of relevance theory, takes a retrospective view of the issues addressed by the volume and considers the implications of literary studies for cognitive approaches to
communication. Relevance theory, described by Alastair Fowler as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's', offers a comprehensive pragmatics of language and communication grounded in evidence about the ways humans think and behave. While designed to capture the everyday murmur of conversation, gossip, peace-making, hate speech, love speech, 'body-language', and the chatter of the internet, it covers the whole spectrum of human modes
of communication, including literature in the broadest sense as a characteristically human activity. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime
resource for literary study, and it is also the first to claim that the model works best for literature when understood in the light of a broader cognitive approach, focusing on a range of phenomena that support an 'embodied' conception of cognition and language. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory, that the 'code model' is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes
of communication that are proper to literature.
Table of Contents:
Terence Cave and Deirdre Wilson: Introduction
1: Elleke Boehmer: The Mind in Motion: A Cognitive Reading of W.B. Yeats's 'Long-legged Fly'
2: Raphael Lyne: Relevance Across History
3: Guillemette Bolens: Relevance Theory and Kinesic Analysis in Don Quixote and Madame Bovary
4: Neil Kenny: Relevance Theory and the Effect of Literature on Beliefs: The Example of Injun Joe in Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer
5: Kirsti Sellevold: On the Borders of the Ostensive: Blushing in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
6: Wes Williams: Invisible guests': Shared Contexts, Inference, and Poetic Truth in Heaney's 'Album V'
7: Kathryn Banks: Look again', 'Listen, listen', 'Keep looking': Emergent Properties and Sensorimotor Imagining in Mary Oliver's Poetry
8: Timothy Chesters: The Lingering of the Literal in Some Poems of Emily Dickinson
9: Terence Cave: Towards a Passing Theory of Literary Understanding
10: Deirdre Wilson: Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation
Bibliography of Works Cited
About the Author :
Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, Emeritus Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He holds an honorary doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London. and is Chevalier dans l'Ordre National du Mérite (France). He is recognized as a leading specialist in French Renaissance literature, but has also made landmark contributions to
comparative literature and the history of poetics. In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500 and subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an Object of Knowledge' (2010-14). His most
recent work focuses on cognitive approaches to literature. Deirdre Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at UCL and co-director of the Linguistic Agency project at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. Her book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, co-written with Dan Sperber, was described in the London Review of Books as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's' and in Rhetoric Society
Quarterly as 'probably the best book you'll ever read on communication.' Translated into twelve languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malay, Indonesian, and Arabic), it has had a lasting influence in
philosophy, psychology, and linguistics and is now regarded as a classic.
Review :
...the important contribution this volume makes to the understanding of relevance theory and its relation to literary interpretation. It shows explicitly what relevance theory shares with other cognitive approaches and how it differs. In respecting the power of literary language as ostensive performance, it invites rather than imposes interpretative strategies that inform the best of literary criticism.
To what extent do the principles of a theory of spontaneous face-to-face communication carry over to the interpretation of carefully crafted literary texts (novels, plays, poems)? That is the central question addressed by this book. The literary studies presented here are deeply informed by Relevance Theory's cognitive-inferential account of communication while remaining acutely alert to the sensorimotor, kinesic, affective and other non-propositional effects that a work of literature may have on a receptive reader. This engaging set of essays is for students of literature, communication theorists, and anyone who has ever marvelled at the rich experience of reading fiction.
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986) revolutionized the understanding of communication: they showed it to depend not simply on decoding, but on selecting optimally relevant results. Reading Beyond the Code, edited by Terence Cave and Deirdre Wilson, now takes up the same relevance theory and applies it to literature. Again the outcome is an important contribution.
The relevance of 'Relevance' to literary understanding was clear from Sperber and Wilson's inauguration of the concept. After literary theory's long wanderings in the wilderness, it brought literary studies back to the conditions of everyday life and thought. Its claims have since been strengthened by interaction with cognitive science and a three-year Balzan research programme. As a sequel, the present essay collection shows how subtly the central idea has been developed and how fruitfully it can be applied to a wide range of texts and genres.
