Voices in a love story: Mérida letters from the eighteenth century
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Alexandra Álvarez
Abstract
The letter is the written genre, which in the past was nearest to orality, and it was used in the eighteenth century as a very important way of communicating officially and privately. The corpus of 33 letters under study constitutes a dialogue which discusses the issues concerning the marriage of a young mulatto girl with a slave. The corpus introduces 16 subjects — speakers and listeners or readers and writers in different production formats — instantiating the voices in this story. These voices represent conflicting ideologies — social and religious — but also conflicting interests in the development of the action. The study takes the corpus as a single text and interprets the plurality of voices as polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Voices in a love story: Mérida letters from the eighteenth century
- Getting closer to context: a case study of communication between ship and shore in an emergency situation
- Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction
- Re-examining narrativity: small stories in status updates
- Revisiting metaphor types as discourse strategies: the case of psychotherapeutic discourse
- The coordinate structures in a corpus of New Age talks: “man and woman”/“woman and man”
Articles in the same Issue
- Voices in a love story: Mérida letters from the eighteenth century
- Getting closer to context: a case study of communication between ship and shore in an emergency situation
- Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction
- Re-examining narrativity: small stories in status updates
- Revisiting metaphor types as discourse strategies: the case of psychotherapeutic discourse
- The coordinate structures in a corpus of New Age talks: “man and woman”/“woman and man”
