This book explores the value for literary studies of the model of
communication known as relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of
examples-lyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary
Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith
Wharton-nine 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.
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