Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

5 Literary text, context and literariness
Exploring distinctive properties of 
literary discourse we shall now briefly 
consider scholarly debates on literary discourse which traditionally focus on 
interpretation centred either on the text (i.e. a hermeneutic approach) or take a 
contextual approach. It seems that the major intention here is to propose certain 
criteria or place requirements on literary production and reception. However, 
these discussions address the problems of interpretation and literary meaning 
only marginally, and the majority of them disregard reader responses to literary 
text. It is not our aim here to discuss problems studied in literary criticism in detail 
and complexity. Yet certain issues need to be incorporated into our discussion on 
what is 
literary discourse and if it results in a type of reading different from that 
studied in 
discourse processing in general. To delimit efficiently the scope of this 
discussion, we shall focus on three particular issues: the role of the reader, the 
role of genre, and major distinctive qualities (if any) of literature (cf. Miall 2002). 
Despite the fact that some reader response theorists soon shifted their attention 
from the reader toward questions of culture and history, believing that readers 
belong to a particular interpretive community (cf. Fish 1980), many of the issues 
they raised are of considerable interest. For instance Schmidt (1982) directed 
his study differently and focused on the conventions of reading, distinguishing 
between an aesthetic and the so-called polyvalence convention. The polyvalence 
convention is seen as being in opposition to 
monovalence
;
it supposes that, in 
a literary context, readers recognize the possibility of multiple interpretations 
of the same text (cf. Miall 2002: 324). This capacity of readers to recognize 
polyvalence in text interpretation can be well explained in pragmatic terms as 
reader’s engagement in the inferential process. Studying inferential processes has 
been proven as the most beneficial way in which 
pragmatic stylistics overlaps 
with literary study, shedding light on questions of literary interpretation, literary 
criticism and literary value. The following statement by a pragmatic stylistician 
illustrates the nature of inferential processes: the reader considers and re-
considers multiple interpretations to finally arrive at (from his point of view) the 
most accurate interpretation of a text, together with an appreciation of its newly 
discovered literary values:
“
I have sometimes thought I did not think much of a particular text and 
then found myself thinking about it repeatedly until I changed my mind 
and decided that it was more significant to me than I had realised. The 
relative ‘stickiness’ of inferences may well be an important factor in 
determining how literary ‘value’ is acquired by a text
.” (Clark 2009: 5)

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Another significant convention in literary studies is that of 
genre (cf. 
Section 6). It is generally assumed that the features of a text are determined by 
its particular generic form: 
genre focuses on the specific qualities and structures 
of the text. Shifting from its descriptive to an explanatory role, the category of 
genre “embodies certain social roles that govern the relation between text and 
reader” (Miall 2002: 325). Many authors have expressed their views on genre 
assuming that “there is no genreless text” (Derrida 1980: 65). In this respect, 
genre can be understood as the defining context for all textual behaviour, literary 
and non-literary. Therefore we can say that genre determines a speaker’s textual 
behaviour in each particular situation, context or sphere. Linguistic variation 
which correlates with situation, social setting and social role is known as 
register. Thus we may assume that genre governs register: the category of genre 
determines the use of a particular register in any given text, the use of actual 
semantic and syntactic features that create the given communicative situation, 
together with the speaker’s role and attitude (cf. Halliday 1978). As discourse 
structures genres are characterized by types of story grammar or schemata, they 
specify situation models characteristic of a given literary text and they enable 
readers to predict how the text is likely to develop. This provides space for more 
complex empirical studies on the reading of literary texts, involving a debate 
about “whether literary texts enjoy some distinctive status or literariness” (Miall 
2002: 326).
The term literariness originally implied that there are literary texts which 
show certain distinctiveness from other text types. The study of literariness has 
attracted the attention of generations of scholars. More recently the idea of a 
conventional nature of literature has been emphasized and consequently the idea 
that literary texts are distinctive by the quality of specific features, dismissed. As 
demonstrated in stylistics by extensive analytical work on a variety of text types, 
formal aspects of language cannot guarantee stable meaning and no aspects of 
language can be labelled as formal (cf. Miššíková 2009, 2011).
In the empirical domain, scholars have studied cognitive processes, pointing 
out that they apply equally to our comprehension of text and refusing the idea 
that specific or distinct cognitive processes are in progress when literary text is 
interpreted. As emphasized by van Dijk (1979: 151) we have to “strictly deny 
the completely ‘specific’ nature of so-called ‘literary interpretation’” and see 
differences in terms of pragmatic and social functions of literature.