Linguistik
Refine
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2) (remove)
Keywords
- relevance theory (2) (remove)
The shared communicative act of theatrical texts in performance: a relevance theoretic approach
(2020)
This article adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Theatrical texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act.
Smith (1968) argues that poems may end with formal changes which produce an experience of closure in the reader. I argue that formal changes do not directly cause an experience of closure. Instead, changes in poetic form always demand increased processing effort from the reader, whether they involve new forms, shifts from more to less regular form, or from less to more regular form. I use relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) to argue that the increased processing effort encourages the reader to formulate rich and relevant thoughts, including the thought "this poem has closure". Closure is thus the content of a thought rather than a type of experience. I further argue that "closure" is a term whose meaning cannot be fully understood, which makes the thought "this poem has closure" into a schematic belief of the kind which Sperber shows has great richness and productivity. This is one of the reasons that the thought "this poem has closure" achieves sufficient relevance to justify the effort put into processing the end of the poem.