Conventions of literature One relevant convention or disposition that has emerged from the analysis of stories(ranging from personal anecdotes to entire novels) goes by the forbidding name of the hyper-protected cooperative principle but is actually rather simple. Communication depends on the basic convention that participants are cooperating with one another and that, therefore, what one person says to the other is likely to be relevant. If I ask you whether George is a good student and you reply, he is usually punctual. I make sense of your reply by assuming that you are cooperating and saying something relevant to my question. Instead of complaining. You didn't answer my question: I may conclude that you did answer implicitly and indicated that there's little positive to be said about George as a student. I assume, that is, that you are cooperating unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary.
Now literary narratives can be seen as members of a larger class of stories, narrative display texts, utterances whose relevance to listeners lies not in information they convey but in their tellability. Whether you are telling an anecdote to a friend or writing a novel for posterity you are doing something different from. say, testifying in court you are trying to produce a story that will seem worth it to your listeners: that to will have some sort of point or significance will amuse or give pleasure. what sets off literary works from other narrative display texts is that they have undergone a process of selection: they have been published.