ABSTRACT
Relevance is largely a matter of content, as the experiences of the viewer’s life are matched to those represented in the text, but it has an important formal dimension as well-it is not just the selection of stories, but the manner of their telling that determines their relevance. Open, popular texts make their content available to a wider range of uses; they admit the production of a wider range of relevances than do more closed, authoritative ones. Relevance requires connections between the text and the social experience of the reader that precedes it: reading is not merely a decipherment (de Certeau 1984) of signs, but the bringing to bear upon the text of previously existing knowledges. Reading is a cultural practice, not a set of skills.
