Take the Floor. Professional Communication Theoretically Contextualized

In Take the Floor I explored the conditions of communication inflected by habitus. Apart from Bourdieu’s definition of the notion, Rapport and Overing (2003: 2) emphasized those transposable dispositions which generate structured social practices. Understanding the conditions of habitus allows the generator of discourses, endowed with agency, to insert in them manipulative or propagandistic ingredients. Thus, literature can very well function as a platform for public relations or advertising. Every author assesses readers’ objectives and needs before elaborating narratives. Postmodernism also resorted to multi-layered discourses in the post-totalitarian epoch and revived the importance of cultural symbols (flags, statues, and religious icons), exactly as in the medieval epoch (cf. Sammuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1997).

In order to deconstruct the toxic discourses of a macdonaldized and disneylandized post-industrial society, reception has to resort to mediated discourse analysis, as it includes the social identities and social relationships made possible by certain discourses (Hyland and Paltridge 2011: 10). Actions are transformed into texts and texts into actions in a never-ending entextualization. The reception of literature is basically intralingual translation and every literary encoded message will be decoded in panoplies of meanings, depending on the level of communication between works of art and their readership. Respecting the pattern of everyday communication, the feedback offered by readers is influenced by context, noise, mood, level of decoding, filters and so on.