Las lecturas actuales de la comunicación literaria en el espacio medieval

Abstract

This article defends the theory that current perspectives about the past are actually conditioned by several types of logics, specially those deriving from social and semiotic disciplines. Following Bourdieu’s conception of social field, we try to show how our present-day misreadings of medieval texts are subjected to the particular field whereby readers operate, thus providing texts with new or unexpected functions. From the point of view of social logics, there are two main views of «the medieval» from which to focus our attention. The first one is that of national identities (putting the pragmatic use at the service of some doxa or social heterodoxy as an aspect of social and cultural cohesion). The second one is the academic domain, where two other fields may be discerned: that of restricted and that of large production. From a semiotic standpoint, we attemp to show the way the text may establish new communicative relationships and is endowed with supplementary fictional or artistic power. This would happen whenever there is a change in the social and cultural contexts sender and receiver share.