Poderes de la palabra

Doing things with words: this is how J. L. Austin defines the object of his pragmatic analysis of discourses, of the relationship that the syntax of signs and their semantic content maintain with the agents of all communicative processes and with their context. Such a perspective made rhetoric current, the discipline created by the sophists that survives with redoubled validity in our digital galaxy and that in North American democracy has given interesting examples of political efficacy with Reagan or Obama. Thus, it is obligatory to pay attention to the outskirts of the literary, where the eminent word, without renouncing its aesthetic benefits, also serves other purposes and takes as its reference not only the existing reality, but also the one that it itself creates. . Twelve chapters are gathered here that deal with how Rhetoric serves pure literature, but also jurisprudence, politics, advertising, urban planning or the invention -rather than the recreation- of the very existence of the people who write their autobiography. The figure of Marshall McLuhan stands out, who with The Gutenberg Galaxy has exerted an enormous influence. His students immediately revealed to him that they belonged to a technological, communicative, and cultural galaxy different from that of a literature professor, immersed as they were already in the bubble of "electrical media". He passed away in 1980; he could not, therefore, but guess in his most visionary pages the irruption of the "Internet Galaxy" of the "digital natives".