Prompting migrants’ experiential processes of deconstructing and authenticating a host community’s literary text through ELF

Abstract

This chapter introduces an ELF-mediated on-going research project aimed at involving communities of migrants and refugees hosted in Southern Italy who are encouraged to access and ‘authenticate’ (Widdowson 1979) the Italian theatrical culture according to their own linguacultural and experiential backgrounds. Such an appropriation is assumed to occur by having migrants improvising on the plays (Checkhov 1953; Johnstone 1981), translating and re-writing them (Slembrouck 1999) into their own ELF variations, thus creating parallel texts to the original ones, and then embodying them on an actual stage (Guido 1999). This study specifically presents a case study on migrants’ appropriation and embodiment of Luigi Pirandello’s play Six characters in search of an author , where the original characters’ experiences of displacement and identity loss are filtered, reinterpreted and re-contextualized through the subjects’ different schemata, and then rendered into their own ELF variations at the semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and metaphorical levels (Guido 2008). The objective is to make migrants appreciate the original text by re-textualizing it into a new parallel one where their own personal experience of existential displacement and of being uprooted from their own native countries can find an artistic expression.