PRODUCTION CONTEXT: COMMUNICATIVE ELEMENTS AND EXAMPLES - LITERATURE - 2025

The production context is the universe of economic, emotional, political, religious, social and cultural circumstances in which a writer is immersed when producing a literary work. Each text has its own characteristics: these represent the identity of the work.

Each literary production has within it a series of signs that allow us to unravel the context in which it was made. The context is a fundamental part of literary creation because it locates the reader, allowing to know the events that conditioned the realization of the text, reinforcing its communicative character.

The production context is manifested in different ways according to the literary genre that the author covers. There is a type of contextual expressiveness typical of poetry, as well as of the short story, the novel or the essay; Each literary form has an archetype of language to be manifested.

If, in addition to the previous particularities, the author's own customs and habits, what is related to his psyche and complex thought are added, we are faced with a network of creation with an irremediable subjective character, the very matrix that makes it possible for each work is unique and unrepeatable.

Communicative elements in the contexts of production and examples

In itself, each literary work is a communicative manifesto, a hymn to human expression, a way of transmitting something to a subject or subjects through written language.

Textual production, being a communicative act that aims to convey an idea, has a series of its own elements that will be explained below.

Transmitter

It is none other than the one who has been in charge of producing a literary work, regardless of the genre to which it is circumscribed or the literary movement to which it belongs. His creation has an intrinsic subjective character, it manifests components of the experiences he has had to live.

Through his work, the author considers manifesting his own reality, transmitting how he has internalized the circumstances that surrounded his existence until the moment of creating the text.

The author may or may not be immersed in the work, he may be the one who describes an event from the outside, or he may be part of reality in the narrative.

What should be clear is that the author fulfills a key communication role: he is the sender, without him the message does not originate and, therefore, the communicative act would not exist. He is in charge of encrypting the message.

Example

One of the most transcendental authors of Hispanic letters has been Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. We owe him El Quijote, the most important written work in Spanish.

His masterpiece is circumscribed in the Golden Age of Castilian letters and contains a strong critical social content.

Lyrical recipient

Also known as the poetic addressee, he is the one who receives the literary work and is in charge of deciphering it, of decrypting the message it contains.

It is important to be clear that there will never be two equal interpretations of a literary text. Each subject, each lyrical receiver will reason the message according to their experiences.

In poetry it is very common to hear poets say that, at the time of finishing a poem, it ceases to be theirs and becomes whoever reads it.

Something very similar to the above occurs with the rest of the literary genres. The author remains the same, but the message has as many interpretations as people who read the work.

The lyrical addressee can be a reader or listener, without any correlation with the drama of the text, or it can be part of the reality of the work, something very common in poetry.

Examples

Non-implied recipient (reader or listener)

This place is occupied by all those who dedicate themselves to reading any literary work of drama, fiction or suspense, or who are going to appreciate a theatrical work (remember that the dramatic text is part of the literary production) without there being anything that can correlate them. For example, whoever is currently reading the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Implied recipient

It corresponds to all those people to whom the literary work is explicitly addressed, receive it as their own and give the respective interpretation of the encrypted or coded message. A poem is described below in which the above is exemplified:

«To humanity», from the book Of man and other wounds of the world by Juan Ortiz.

Here the author expresses an open dedication to the human species. The recipient does not necessarily have to be a single person.

Social context

Absolutely every literary work is subject to a social contextualization. The social context concerns both the sender and the receiver of the message; This becomes the conditioning medium for the production of the idea and its reception. The context of the author never coincides with that of the recipient: there are marked differences between the two.

Starting from the above, we can speak of two types of social contexts: a social context of production and a social context of reception.

Social context of production

He speaks directly to us of the writer's situation. Each author is subject to an economic, political, religious, emotional and family reality that directly conditions their work.

No matter how much it is said that there are works in which the author does not interfere, there are always biographical marks in literary works. These biographical marks are small traces on the life of the author.

It can be said that, when someone writes, there is a defragmentation of the psyche, and it is being disintegrated throughout the entire work. There is no way to unlink the written letter from the subject that produces it.

Example

A clear and marked example of the conditioning that the political, social and family situation produces in the writing process is the work The Diary of Anne Frank. There the harsh reality of the Second World War and its repercussions in the lives of so many people is expressed. Read it and go back in time and live what she lived.

“After that moment, my desire to see the night again overcame my fear of thieves, the dark, rat-filled house and theft. I went down all alone to look out the window of Dad's office and the kitchen. Many people like nature, many sleep from time to time in the open, many of those who are in prisons and hospitals do not see the day when they can freely enjoy nature again, but few, like us They are so separated and isolated from the thing they want, and that is the same for rich as for poor ”.

Fragment of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Social context of production

This refers directly to all the circumstances that have involved the life of the reader before facing the literary work. Nobody has the same receptive identity when reading a text. Each subject is a world unto itself, and this is manifested very clearly in literary reading and interpretation.

The same aspects that condition the writer condition the lyrical receiver, only the second case is linked to how the message is decoded, how it is received and internalized. Something as simple as a long day at work can affect the decoding of a text.

Example

A very graphic example will be given: in a well-known university a group of engineering students was assigned a fragment of Don Quixote, by Cervantes. The same fragment was fixed to another group of students of Spanish American letters. The text was left to them for two hours.

At the end of the time period, both groups were asked to explain what they had read. The results were more than obvious: despite being a universal work of literature, literature students demonstrated a greater mastery of the subject compared to engineering students.

Literature students had the advantage of contextualization, as it was their field of study. However, and here is the complexity of the subject, no student from both sides assimilated the text in the same way, there had to be an agreement to express the conclusions. Although there were points in common, the uniqueness emerged.

Another important aspect is that, if the text delivered had been engineering, the story would have been different.

Literary trends

It corresponds to the movement in which the literary work is framed. This series of currents also responds to socio-political and economic aspects, they are circumscribed to the realities of the different periods of human history.

Within the best known currents we find modernism, surrealism, avant-garde and romanticism, and within these, their respective authors. It is worth noting that genres (novels, short stories, poetry, essays, theater) should not be confused with currents.

When responding to historical needs, literary currents contain certain rules that condition the works of the authors. This is appreciated both in thematic and in the aesthetics; an influence of form and substance can be evidenced in these productions.

Example

"Autumn", poem XXVII of Songs of life and hope (1905) by the poet Rubén Darío.

«I know there are those who say: why don't you sing now

with that harmonious madness of yesteryear?

They do not see the profound work of the hour,

the work of the minute and the wonder of the year.

I, poor tree, produced, in the love of the breeze,

when I began to grow, a vague and sweet son.

The time for the youthful smile is over:

let the hurricane move my heart! ».

This poem is framed within that current of modernism, whose premise was to decentralize man's feelings regarding regionalism and make poetic feelings universal.

Rubén Darío wanted to break with the aesthetics imposed by literary romanticism to abolish once and for all the ties still existing with the Spanish Crown at the beginning of the 20th century. Modernism seeks universality and was considered one of the most important and productive literary movements in the history of letters.

Implications

All work will always respond to the events that surrounded the lives of the writers and will be received by readers and assimilated in proportion to their experiences and intellectual preparation. Each written work, regardless of the genre or movement to which it responds, is a communicative resource.

A literary work will have as many meanings as people who read it. There will be points in common, but subjective perception will prevail over this, the product of all experiential load accumulated by the subject before facing the literary work.

Literary production is an intimate manifestation of the human psyche. There will always be a characteristic mark that allows to see traits of the personality or of the author's life itself. The author cannot be disassociated from his production, there is a close lasting link beyond time and space between the work and the writer.

The study of the elements of the context of literary production allows locating in time and space to be able to appreciate the works in a more reliable way and, therefore, more effectively capture and decode the message they contain.

References

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