Because of such multiple possible interpretations or polysemy of texts, how the reader receives or interprets a text needs to be considered as well as the supposed original intention of the text or its author. Furthermore, they have observed that language is full of ambiguities, so that a given narrative is unlikely to have a single undisputed, obvious, or correct interpretation. Postmodernist critics have taken more notice of the effects that linguistic structures have on the content of what is conveyed in text. This spectacular reversal has largely come about because of the development and spread of what may be loosely described as the postmodernist critique of modernist thought. Now, not only has rhetoric been rehabilitated in its own immediate province of language and literature, but it has also achieved a new relevance, if not dominance, in all the various fields of the humanities and social sciences, with some reference being made to it in the criticism of the natural sciences as well. Before that time, rhetoric had indeed been neglected by Western scholars, except for a few, and most of the latter worked in languages other than English. The last five decades or so have seen a great reversal of fortune across the world as far as rhetoric is concerned.
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