Fixing Meaning: Intertextuality, Inference and the Horizon of the Publishable

An account of reading emerges from a critical encounter between intertextual accounts of textual production and reception (including Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes and Roger Chartier) and pragmatic accounts of inference – specifically Paul Grice's account of implicature and Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory. Building on RM's PhD thesis, reading is critically theorised here as both intertextual and inferential in ways that neither intertextual nor inferential theories can predict. Reading and textual production as processes are in turn always governed by a concept that RM formulates as the horizon of the publishable: the full range of publishing processes – composition, editing, marketing, production – and their relations with various other processes and institutions – commercial, legal, educational and especially other media - which intersect in the edition as a set of intertextual practices. (Note that RP's page format accommodates more than twice the wordage of a standard book or journal page).