Non-literary communicative acts in literary style

Abstract Many literary texts prove a tendency to simulate features of diverse communicative acts, styles and genres that are primarily applied in non-literary spheres of communication (for instance journalism, administration, science). The aim of this paper is to suggest a possible theoretical framework for this phenomenon and to describe some ways of simulating non-literary styles in literary texts. The aforementioned simulating can be seen as a form of interdiscursivity that introduces external elements into literary texts. The functioning of it is conditioned by a process of decontextualization and recontextualization that is signalled by various paratextual and textual cues. Taking three Czech prosaic works as examples, the concrete use of this form of interdiscursivity is illustrated in the last part of the paper.