Pragmatics, emotion and literature

Affect plays a central role in both the creation and interpretation of literature. Authors often communicate feelings and emotions through their writing, aiming to elicit affective responses in the reader, which can vary greatly across individuals. This emotional resonance is widely seen as a key factor in a particular text’s impact. But despite the fundamental role of emotion in communication and most human endeavours, the mental processes underlying cognition and emotion are often
treated as separate entities. Moreover, pragmatic theories also tend to view the vague, nebulous content of emotion as secondary to propositional content.
This chapter explores the relationship between emotion and literature by drawing inspiration from affective science and pragmatic theories, particularly, relevance theory. While relevance theory explains communication as an inferential process guided by the search for relevance, its traditional focus on propositional effects means it has struggled to account for the non-propositional, ineffable nature of the reader’s affective experience. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary work, we suggest that in processing a literary utterance, the cognitive effects in relevance theory often need to be supplemented by the notion of affective effects, which arise from emotional states and guide the search for information relevant enough to be worth processing. Such effects help explain how readers engage with a text, and why the impact of a literary work often lies not in what is said, but in how it makes us feel.