Subject collection: Communication Studies (152 titles, 2000–2015)

Viewing literature as one among other forms of communication, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues evaluate writer-respondent relationships according to the same ethical criterion as applies for dialogue of any other kind. In a nutshell: Are writers and readers respecting each other’s human autonomy? If and when the answer here is “Yes!”, Sell’s team describe the communication that is going on as ‘genuine’. In this latest book, they offer new illustrations of what they mean by this, and ask whether genuineness is compatible with communicational directness and communicational indirectness. Is there a risk, for instance, that a very direct manner of writing could be unacceptably coercive, or that a more indirect manner could be irresponsible, or positively deceitful? The book’s overall conclusion is: “Not necessarily!” A directness which is truthful and stimulates free discussion does respect the integrity of the other person. And the same is true of an indirectness which encourages readers themselves to contribute to the construction and assessment of ideas, stories and experiences – sometimes literary indirectness may allow greater scope for genuineness than does the directness of a non-literary letter. By way of illustrating these points, the book opens up new lines of inquiry into a wide range of literary texts from Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, and the United States.

In Exploring Argumentative Contexts Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen bring together a broad variety of essays examining argumentation as it occurs in seven communicative domains: the political context, the historical context, the legal context, the academic context, the medical context, the media context, and the financial context. These essays are written by an international group of argumentation scholars, consisting of Corina Andone, Sarah Bigi, Robert T. Craig, Justin Eckstein, Frans H. van Eemeren, Norman Fairclough, Eveline Feteris, Gerd Fritz, Bart Garssen, Kara Gilbert, Thomas Gloning, G. Thomas Goodnight, Dale A. Herbeck, Darrin Hicks, Thomas Hollihan, Jos Hornikx, Isabela Ieţcu-Fairclough, Gábor Kutrovátz, Maurizio Manzin, Davide Mazzi, Dima Mohammed, Rudi Palmieri, Angela G. Ray, Patricia Riley, Robert C. Rowland, Peter Schulz, Karen Tracy, and Gergana Zlatkova.

Editorials define at a given time how media construct their socio-cultural environment and where they position themselves in it. In this sense, they are snapshots of media socio-cultural identities whose study is crucial for the understanding of media actions and interactions on the political stage. This book contributes to the study of media roles in politics with a methodological “discursive communication identity framework” and its application to a corpus of editorials. This allows for the definition of editorials as a genre, and it reveals that, thanks to a very adroit interweaving of their socio-cultural identities, news media can play a much more active role on the political stage than studies on framing and agenda setting have hitherto shown. The place of media in political communication models might therefore need to be reviewed. This book is intended for all those interested in media and politics whatever their academic specializations.

How genres emerge and evolve on the Internet has become one of the central questions in studies of computer-mediated communication (CMC). This book addresses the issue of genrefication by giving an in-depth analysis of email hoaxes as a candidate for digital genre status. Email hoaxes are deceptive messages that spread in digital social networks; they are a fascinating object for discourse linguistics as they exemplify a major pragmatic tendency in CMC, namely deceptivity and a lowering of sincerity standards. This study examines formal and functional aspects of email hoaxes and provides ample evidence both from a systematized corpus and in situ data collected online. Besides a structural and microlinguistic analysis, it identifies key issues such as pragmatic duality, narrativity and textual variation and change in email hoaxes. In conclusion, a digital genre model is outlined that bridges both the old/new and the formal/functional gaps and may be applied to many other digital genre ecologies.