Download or read book Paradigms of Reading written by I. MacKenzie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-09-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic signs do not coincide with intended or interpreted meanings. For relevance theory, this theoretical commonplace merely demonstrates the inferential nature of language. For Paul de Man, on the contrary, it suggested that language is unstable, random, arbitrary, mechanical, ironic and inhuman. This book seeks to show that relevance theory is a more plausible account of communication, cognition and literary interpretation than the deconstructionist theory de Man elaborated from readings of Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche.