Dear all,
Today I am going to add the following online reference to the RT online list:
Keith Green
Creative Writing, Language and Evaluation
Working Papers on the Web 2, 2000.
http://www.shu.ac.uk/wpw/green.htm
In this article, Green continues his arguments against a (possible?) RT approach to literary interpretation and poetic effects. The part of the article dealing specifically with this issue is quoted below:
Broadly speaking, pragmatics, as the relation between signs and interpreters and users (Morris 1946) locates the linguistic sign in a network of meaning-functions including context, the role of the addressee and cognitive domain. Pragmatic linguistic theories have been appropriated for the discussion of literary value, albeit on a very simple basis. Relevance theory is a case in point. The theory should not give rise to an interpretive methodology; it is a theory that attempts to account for text processing. Its basic premise is simple: in processing text, addressees or readers go for 'optimal relevance' the swiftest and most manifest interpretation possible. It is important to recognise that this is not a conscious decision played out in reading or interpreting, but a cognitive process to which we all are subject. Adrian Pilkington, at the close of a paper on relevance theory and metaphor states:
. I would like to argue that the Relevance theoretic account of poetic effects might form the basis for a theory of literary value. Just as literary criticism should be centrally concerned with questions about literary value. (Pilkington, 1990: 117)
The problem with this approach as a way forward to evaluation is that it is completely counterintuitive. The common ground between some modern literary theorists and pragmaticists is the conception of the text as partly created by the reader. Immanent textual value, however, can only exist if the text is construed as stable and objective. If we switch our perspective to the reader - as many critics before the relevance theorists have done - all sorts of problems arise including old issues disguised as new ones.
For the relevance theorist textual complexity is manifested in a range of weak contextual effects and greater processing effort. A contextual effect is when some new information is processed in the light of what is already known. Pilkington states:
The Principle of Relevance states not simply that every act of ostensive-inferential information communication carries a guarantee of relevance, but that it carries a guarantee of optimal relevance. By that it is meant that the addressee should derive a satisfactory range of contextual effects for minimal justifiable processing effort. (Pilkington, 1990: 105-6)
This is a cognitively-focused version of a simple truth that complex texts have a range of possible meanings open to them and in some senses are difficult to decode. However, it does assume a communication model of language in that the 'default' activity of the addressee is to get to the implied meaning of an utterance with the minimum of effort. This sounds like common sense, but reduces all language-interpretation to a narrow cognitive act. Pilkington suggests that by its very nature, the literary text requires greater processing effort, manifesting a greater range of weak implicatures (compare such a text to a note to the milkman - this has a single strong implicature of the request for milk). The weight of meaning is now firmly back with the text and Pilkington's analysis does not take into account the different types of interpretive acts or reading experiences possible. The literary text (and, in fact, all texts) can be (and indeed often is) read in a manner quite contrary to the principle of relevance: go for the most difficult and stubborn interpretation; guarantee vagueness, obscurity.
Now, perhaps the theory can still be tied in with the more formal aspects of linguistics. We might say, for instance, that formal complexity is more likely to give rise to a range of weak implicatures . Putting aside for a moment the question of what precisely formal complexity might be we could posit, say, a certain syntactic complexity as one possible criterion. The later Henry James, the later James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, and the modernists would easily fit in here. It is obvious, though, that formal difficulty as one mobilisation of weak implicatures is not a sound criterion for assessment of aesthetic value, for formal complexity is not equivalent to the kind of cognitive complexity that the relevance theorists and others wish to pin down, even if 'complexity' itself were a valid expression. Clearly, the kind of complexity evident (or not so evident) in the poetry of William Carlos Williams is quite different from that of Finnegans Wake. The manifestation of a range of weak implicatures cannot, therefore, be attributed solely to some arbitrary formal characteristic. If ambiguity or obscurity are markers, too, of a range of weak implicatures there is no necessary link to value. Indeed, as Umberto Eco (1979) has shown, there is something about the texts of Joyce and other modernists which is 'closed' rather than 'open' in that they prescribe their readerships with a regulated literary competence. Indeed, to press this further, one might say that because literary texts are generically prescribed, the range of contextual effects is smaller. I might not know what a lyric poem 'means', but I know the kinds of things that it is trying to do.
Cordially,
Dr. Francisco Yus
University of Alicante
Department of English Studies
http://www.ua.es/dfing/personal/profs/yus.htm
http://cibersociedad.rediris.es/yus/
Apartado 99
E-03080 Alicante (Spain)
e-mail (university) francisco.yus@ua.es
e-mail (home) f.yus@mail.ono.es
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