An ostensive-inferential model of communication offers useful tools for organizing our thinking about reading works from the past and practising historicist criticism. Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ is woven into the religious controversies of its time, but it also accesses more or less timeless traditions in poetry (pastoral; carpe diem). It looks backward into tradition, forward into posterity, and at its immediate context. In order to describe the poem’s different kinds of communication with readers at different temporal and cultural distances, it is useful to see its intentions, the different things it might communicate, and its implicatures as an ‘array’ (a term taken from Sperber and Wilson’s ‘array of implicatures’). A cognitive pragmatics of literary interpretation provides good ways of exploring how writers explore this multiple communication, how they use contemporary readers as a screen for posterity, and how they use posterity as a screen for the contemporary.
Carpe Diem and Slow Down
