Bridging across Communities: Time frames and reader's engagement in popular history

Communicating knowledge to members of different discourse communities requires “mediation” across knowledge asymmetries but also an understanding of the different purposes that may characterize general interest in specialized knowledge. The process can be seen as one of bridging across discourse communities. The process of re-contextualization is particularly intriguing when studied in the field of the humanities, where re-contextualizing is not just a matter of giving the basic preliminary knowledge, but rather a process of highlighting the value of the area investigated, its relevance to the everyday life of readers, or to the communities and identities that characterize their personal experience. The present study looks at deictic references to present time in the discourse of history, exploring how they influence textual sequences and how they involve the different chronotopes (the reader’s present and the past of the historical narrative). Focusing on markers of present reference, the study is based on the assumption that deictics contribute greatly to Reader’s engagement and to the re-contextualization strategies often adopted by history. Combining the tools of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the analysis adopts a cross-generic perspective. The aim is to explore the process of re-contextualization in the dissemination of historical knowledge through a study of journal articles and popular articles written by professional historians. Popular history is shown to make makes careful use of deixis in aligning the reader’s perspective with the writer’s or even that of historical characters. In the re-contextualizing of history, time, place and identity seem to play a major role. By careful use of deictic spaces, readers and their world are turned into the privileged point of view from which specialized historical knowledge is looked at.