Relevance
This chapter reflects on the relevance of literature and literary works. The meaning of the word ‘relevance’ has unobtrusively changed. In the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, ‘relevance’ meant ‘pertinent to a case or argument’ or occasionally ‘pertinent to the matter in hand’. By 1800, however, ‘relevant’ was more often used to mean ‘pertinent to the issue’; and after that it altered rapidly, since what was taken to be the current issue kept changing. In fact, ‘relevance’ began to imply pertinency to specifically new issues, or the newest issue. In literary criticism, this collectivist assumption had an astonishing influence. Relevance came to be used as an overriding criterion; considerable and negligible, good and bad, were distinguished simply in terms of this one factor. Was the work socially relevant, relevant to the public? Such a criterion could easily exclude much of literature and soon it did. The chapter then looks at modern relevance theory, the thrust of which is to replace decoding with ordinary inference and so to recover the idea of pertinency—albeit pertinency reconceived in linguistic terms.