“Spontaneous Poetry”: Literary Titles as Relevance Optimisers

Talk about books happens all the time in social life, and occasionally particular titles are attached to particular political causes. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, for example, has often been cited in discussions about redress for the internment of Japanese during WW II. This paper will trace the use of two, more recent titles to give an account of this talk from a linguistic pragmatic perspective. First is Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life (1998), which has recently been cited in Alberta’s parliamentary discussions of Bill 46, regarding their “Criminal Notoriety Act” (2004) concerning criminals profiting from writing about their crimes; and second is Patricia Grace’s Baby No Eyes (1998), which was recently cited in a focus group discussion determining lay understandings within Maori communities of the impact of new biotechnologies on the environment (Roberts & Fairweather 2004: 62). These titles are giving rise to chains of citation and recontextualisation; their readers, it follows, are not solitary individuals seeking aesthetic experience and moral enhancement, but rather audience members of diverse often politicised communities. Speakers utter titles in the hope that they carry some degree of rhetorical force—enough, at least, to make the utterances worthwhile. Titles of literary works are (amongst other things) “designative” of that “to which we wish to refer repeatedly” (Fisher 1984: 287); they “allow discourse” (292). Often they are poetic, constituting, perhaps, Kenneth Burke’s idea of “spontaneous poetry” (The Rhetoric of Motives 34). Daniel Dor’s (2003) work on newspaper headlines, including those that use figurative language, suggests that their production and reception can be best explained using Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory. Newspaper headlines, Dor maintains, are designed to optimise relevance for readers, in other words to produce in a reader’s consciousness the most “productivity or yield” (123) for the least cognitive effort. My study will assess literary titles as relevance optimizers, describing the process via which literary titles find their way into locations outside and apart from literary and literary critical domains. Relevance theory will help me articulate the action of these mentions—at once superficial (fleeting and peripheral illustrations to bolster a political concern) and deeply significant (the eruption into public discourse of aspects of the “private” reading).