Emotions through touristic discourses. Mediation and rendition of an urban experience

International audienceIn the perspective of an articulation between theoretical investigations and practical problems related to the analysis of the relations between emotions and languages, this chapter attempts to deepen our understanding of the semiotic status accorded to emotions in the production and interpretation of discourses in the field of tourism. Specifically, this study focuses on photographic discourses in a digital context which seek to mediate a certain image of the city of Paris. Our general considerations are based on sampling corpus made up of syncretic texts, in particular those present on the OUI.SNCF website, where photographic representations of Paris are articulated with verbalizations in order to catalyze the narrative and affective appropriation that internet users will make of them.Our contribution aims to characterize the processes of discursive production and reception by which an ‘emotional climate of the city’ (the pervasive experiences of an urban environment) is translated into specific institutional communication (places conceived as texts): “to each district its own face!”. Drawing inspiration from Goffman’s notion of rendition (1974: 116–117), which expresses the modalization and transformation of normative forms, we conceive the translation of emotions as a negotiation of experience on the crest between restoring the potentialities of space in their maximum intensity and rendering the invitation to appropriate the city into a codification of desire according to conforming approaches