When Lucy ceas’d to be

What is it about?

In this chapter I illustrate relevance theory’s account of cognition and maximal relevance with reference to a dozen published interpretations (including de Man’s) of a very well-known lyric poem, Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’. This is followed by a brief conclusion in which I reiterate my reasons for claiming that relevance theory – which, like de Man’s theory of rhetoric, takes the noncoincidence of linguistic signs and intended or interpreted meanings as its starting point – is the more plausible description of the nature of language, since it seems to account for the data without needing to be buttressed by very debatable reinterpretations or rewritings of Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche.

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