Italian Discourse Research Articles

An Exploration of Space and Time Metaphorical Expressions in Chinese and Italian

The research constitutes an initial examination of metaphorical expressions associated with temporal and spatial concepts in both the Chinese and Italian languages. Recognizing the profound influence of metaphor on cognitive constructs and linguistic representation, the study adopts a comparative analytical approach to uncover the metaphorical dimensions inherent in expressions related to time and space within these distinct linguistic frameworks. Through the examination of lexical and syntactic elements in both languages, the research aims to elucidate the subtle nuances and cultural variations that characterize the metaphorical richness of temporal and spatial discourse. By comparing Chinese and Italian linguistic structures, the study seeks to reveal commonalities and divergences in the metaphorical strategies used to express concepts related to space and time in these two languages. This comparative exploration not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the metaphorical nature embedded in Chinese and Italian discourse but also sheds light on the cultural and cognitive dimensions that shape these linguistic expressions. The findings of the study serve as a foundational exploration, paving the way for future in-depth investigations into the intricate interplay between language, metaphor, and cognition within the realms of temporal and spatial concepts in both the Chinese and Italian linguistic contexts.

‚Rossini renaissance(s)‘ e discorsi identitari italiani

Abstract Following thematic and theoretical lines set out in two recent ground-breaking studies by Emanuele Senici on Rossini’s music, this article questions Italian discourse on the Rossini renaissance. It thus highlights the identity-related meanings for Italians of three crucial moments in the history of this renaissance: in 1925, with the ‚cycle Rossini‘ at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris; in 1952, with the „Armida“ at the Maggio musicale fiorentino with Maria Callas in the title role; in 1969, with the Italian debut of the critical edition of the „Barber of Seville“ at the Scala in Milan.

Dalla Vostra Parte: populist irony, illiberal ventriloquism, and the rise of the Non Buono refugee in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT Alongside the highly mediatized life of recent Italian politics, populism as a mode of social expression has permeated Italian public discourse since the mid-1990s. This trend has become even more apparent in the aftermath of the so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis in the 2010s. Since then, the Italian popular classes’ increasing engagement with online social media has contributed to the electoral success of anti-immigration leaders and Facebook celebrities like Lega Nord party secretary Matteo Salvini. Simultaneously, controversial black Italian YouTubers like the artist Bello FiGo have also found commercial success, due to their own populist and ironic engagement with Italian immigration policies. This article explores how ideologically divergent media operators such as Salvini and Bello FiGo co-participate in ironic, future-oriented media performances of anti-refugee discourses that make possible different modes of displaced alterity. As we will demonstrate ethnographically, these performances allow for forms of cultural intimacy between these media operators and their publics by means of populist irony, while engendering opposite (though structurally similar) dynamics of illiberal ventriloquism. In doing so, these controversial, future-oriented performances tend to subvert institutionalized liberal narratives of crisis and systemic displacement and put into question Italian immigration policies.

The Functional Psychotherapy Approach: A Process-Outcome Multiple Case Study.

Objective: The present work aims to conduct the first naturalistic empirical investigation of the process and outcome assessment of functional psychotherapy (FP) treatment. The FP model of psychotherapy is rooted in psychoanalysis and integrates the verbal communication approach founded on transference and countertransference dynamics with the analysis of bodily processes.Method: The study sample included ten patients recruited on a voluntary basis and treated by clinicians in their private practices. Each patient received FP with an average duration of 40 h (min 35 and max 42). Therapies had weekly sessions, were audio-recorded with the patient’s written consent, and lasted for an average of 10 months (min 9 and max 12). Outcome and process tools included the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) and the Luborsky’s the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT), used to assess therapeutic benefit, and the Metacognition Assessment Scale (MAS) and the Italian Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (IDAAP) system, used to evaluate therapeutic benefit and process. The MMPI-2 was used also in the follow-up assessment.Results: Results show that FP had a positive therapeutic outcome on the patients assessed in this study, and that the therapeutic benefits were maintained over time. Some specific features of the FP approach were found to contribute more than others to the observed therapeutic benefits.Conclusion: The current investigation constitutes a first step toward assessment of the therapeutic effectiveness of FP. Future developments should apply the methodology to a larger sample, possibly introducing different methodologies to enable detection of specific bodily oriented processes and techniques.

Interaction between a language and a dialect in Italian discourse

The national language is a fundamental and essential communication tool due to the fact that it is evenly distributed throughout the country, it is understood and spoken by most people who have certain rules of language use, and have a certain vocabulary, which more or less depends on the level of education and culture of a person. This article reveals the concept of a language and a dialect, characterizes the contact between them, and considers the dialect’s essence. The study highlights the problem of interaction between a language and a dialect and pays special attention to the role of dialect in language and cultural space. Based on linguistic mapping by isogloss strands, the boundaries of dialects are outlined, and the interpenetration issues of features of neighboring dialects as a result of their long-term interaction are considered. It is also emphasized that the structural features of the dialect change over time due to interdialect interaction and the influence of the literary language, but the dialect as a form of existence of the national language does not disappear, and only transforms into a new quality.

COVID-19 and the Notion of ‘South-Working’ in Italy’s Discourse: Origins and Narrative

The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of ‘south working’ – a word which has been used in Italian discourse during the pandemic – and to explore the origins and different narratives associated with this terminology. To this end, a dataset consisting of newspaper articles was compiled and examined, in order to understand the possible meanings attached to ‘south working’ and their discursive contexts.

Staging resistance matters! Deconstructing structures of power and oppression in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

ABSTRACT Situated on parallel cultural geographies of the global north and south, this study seeks to critically interpret Dario Fo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s theatre as representative of radical theatres of resistance and cultural intervention in their searing reinterpretation of Kenyan and Italian cultural discourse. Through staging narratives of systemic oppression and injustice, these dramatists salvage the history of the subaltern from the ruins of colonial and fascist regimes, thereby transforming their theatre into Marxist tools of counter-information. The concept of theatre as a form of anti-establishment political action and counter-discourse will be analyzed through The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970). Both plays are rooted in specific historical situations that are a part of the collective consciousness of the nation. However, through the use of revolutionary methods – humour, indigenous performance traditions, a critically-invested audience, the rejection of the traditional idea of empathy and catharsis, Fo, Wa Thiong’o and Mugo force spectators in the words of Nicholas Brown ‘to take seriously the possibility that art can be at war – in more than a metaphorical sense – with the state.’

Responses to health risk and suffering: ‘China’ in the Italian media discourses during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic

Italy was one of the first European countries affected by the Covid-19 pandemic after the beginning of the outbreak in China in January 2020. Applying critical discourse analysis and theories of the mediation of suffering, this article explores the discursive strategies used by the Italian media to represent China and Chinese people in relation to the outbreak in the early stage of the pandemic. Employing the theoretical frameworks of Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and other thinkers on biopolitics, racism, and emergency, the results bring to light the persistent ideologies behind the media representations of an imagined Other, which reflect existing discourses toward the Chinese community in Italy. In this study, the contentious discourses around China and the Chinese amidst the pandemic reveal the role of the Italian media in presenting risks, mediating suffering as a distant event and, later, as a national concern.

American Comics and Italian Cultural Identity in 1968: Translation Challenges in a Syncretic Text

Translation supports the construction of a national identity through the selection of foreign texts to be transferred to the target language. Within this framework, the effort made in the 1960s by Italian editors and translators in giving new dignity to comics proves emblematic. This paper aims to reconstruct the reception of American comic strips in Italy going through the issues of Linus published in 1967 and 1968: the selected cartoonists (e.g. Al Capp, Jules Feiffer, and Walt Kelly) participate in the cultural debate of the time discussing politics, war, and civil rights. The analysis of the translation strategies adopted will reveal the difficulty of reproducing the polysemy of metaphors, idioms and puns, trying to maintain consistency between the visual and the verbal code, but primarily the need to create a purely Italian cultural discourse.

La riformulazione in inglese del discorso legale italiano come processo di ‘ELFentextualization’

This paper introduces a new model defined ELFentextualization , devised for the English reformulation of the Italian legal discourse in the field of Migration. It is meant as a pedagogical and practical tool that can help intercultural linguistic mediators increase their competence at the time of analysing and reproducing source texts for an audience of non-native English speakers. In particular, our model is adopted here for the retextualization into English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF) of a number of extracts from the ‘Bossi-Fini’ law and ‘Testo unico sull’immigrazione’, which indicate the actions that migrants have to follow to request residence document. After illustrating the theoretical grounds of the ELFentextualization process, this paper will examine the selected corpus of English retextualizations of Italian legal discourse. The comparison between the original and ‘ELFentextualized’ versions will exemplify that the latter are elaborated after an initial phase of ‘text analysis’, which is meant to infer the gist of the message. The essential pieces of information are then reconstructed by resorting to lexical and syntactic simplification, as well as to the macrorules for text summarization. Finally, this paper enquires into the initial phases of a reception study of the examined reformulations, which will help discuss the lingua-franca connotation of the English uses in the texts under examination.

Architecture and the Time of Space

In this work Deborah Hauptmann deals with the relationships between mind, body, architecture and the city. Major authors ranging from Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin to Henri Lefebvre and Gilles Deleuze are discussed in order to open up thinking on the roles of perception and the cognitive sciences in today’s society. Various themes are explored. Matter and mind are considered as kinds of multiplicities that affect our distinctions between subject and object. A theoretical framework is carefully constructed and argued in detail, allowing us to grapple with the existing problems of a rapidly changing field of disciplinary actions. The author looks at how vitalism has been applied to space, offers a view of the city through the question of who is allowed to claim right to the city and addresses the idea of the virtual and emergent. She examines the problem of experience by posing questions pertaining to both voluntary and involuntary memory. She concludes by making concepts surrounding biopolitics and noopolitics explicit and investigates their past discourses, demonstrating that they are still pertinent to both the field of architecture and philosophy. This study should be regarded as an original contribution to the discipline of architecture in its broadest sense.

Architecture and the Time of Space

Architecture and the Time of Space

The Acquisition of Italian Discourse Markers as a Function of Studying Abroad

This paper investigates the effect of a period of study in Italy on the use of discourse markers (DMs) by Belgian–Dutch learners of Italian as a second language (L2). We recorded dialogical exchanges between 8 Belgian–Dutch learners of L2 Italian, before and after an Erasmus exchange of 6 months in an Italian university. The results of our investigation reveal that, both pre- and post-Erasmus, the most used DMs are si ‘yes’, ok, allora ‘so, then’, quindi ‘then, therefore’, dunque ‘therefore’, be’ ‘well’. Our research also shows that the main effect of the period of study abroad is the increased variation of the pragmatic functions of DMs used by the L2 speakers. Whereas before the Erasmus, DMs are employed almost exclusively with an interactional function, after the Erasmus their spectrum of functions is broaden to cognitive and the meta-discursive functions. Interestingly, we also observe that after the Erasmus, some DMs are used with different non-target functions: we argue that these uses must be analyzed as interferences with the learners’ language background. We conclude the paper with some remarks on the effect of the period of study abroad on L2 fluency, analyzing the clustering of DMs with filled pauses.

Industry and gender in recent representations of Sino-Italian relations

As Italian society struggles to come to terms with the presence of Chinese immigrants and with changing global patterns of industrialisation and shifts in the dynamics of industrial power, the question of Sino-Italian relations is increasingly present in Italian cultural representations across media and genre. Among the themes which recur within Italian discourse on Chinese industry are Made in Italy vs Made in China, tradition vs modernity, and environmental responsibility. In this paper, I offer a reading of the complex and, at times, ambivalent treatment of these themes in Gianni Amelio's 2006 film,La stella che non c’è(The Missing Star), and Alessandro Perissinotto's 2014 novel,Coordinate d'Oriente(Oriental Coordinates). Central to my analysis of the two works is an examination of the trope of contacts between the economies and societies of the two countries being sublimated in the fictional narratives into relationships between Western men and Chinese women. Against this backdrop, I propose an interpretation of the power dynamics which underpin the narratives.

Postcolonial Cultural Hybridity and Cultural Ambivalence in Contemporary Italy: Amara Lakhous's Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008)

ABSTRACTRecent social and political crises in the Middle East and North Africa have forced many people to seek refuge in Europe or elsewhere. Many research studies, films and novels have documented these migrants’ and refugees’ daily struggles to settle and grow roots in an migration space itself permeated by hostility and rejection. This article offers a close analysis of Amara Lakhous's novel, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006) and looks at the act of passing as a postcolonial strategy of cultural and social integration with specific regard to the main protagonist's position and point of view. It draws on the findings and theories of postcolonial studies and comparative approaches to culture. The last section of the article discusses Lakhous's linguistic hybridity as a subversive intervention in contemporary Italian discourse on national identity and national literature.

Italian Narratives of Oppositional Identity

Drawing together scholarship on the late antique and medieval holy man, and modern theoretical work on affect and identity, this article seeks to analyze one method by which group identities in the Mediterranean region broadly, and in Italy specifically, have been defined trans-historically through rhetorical emphasis on the “invasion” of foreignized bodies. The discussion first focuses on late antique Near Eastern Passio texts commemorating Christians who faced persecution under Muslim Saracens, before then shifting to tenth- and eleventh-century southern Italy and Sicily, and to the corpus of Italo-Greek Vitae in which holy individuals regularly encountered the Saracen as a dangerous invader. Such discourses of opposition obscured the inter-reliance between populations, and reduced relations to inherited, primordial struggles, simultaneously shifting attention away from the heterogeneity of non-Muslim resident populations. A similar approach is pursued in modern Italian discourse on migrants, where a selective rhetoric of “invasion” forefront the risks posed by migrants in ways that create a sense of unity in an otherwise-fragmented nation. Urging academic dialogue that incorporates the pre-modern and modern, this article examines the construction of oppositional identity and explores how such narratives reveal collective fears amongst populations threatened by the destabilization of pre-established hierarchies.

Regionalism at all costs Nallo Mazzocchi Alemanni and the Bradano Valley Land Reclamation Project, 1955.

Between 1950 and 1956, one fifth of the Italian landscape was profoundly reshaped. According to the first ten-year plan issued by the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, 51 aqueducts and around 3,000 km of roads would provide the necessary infrastructure to rehouse millions of farmers, while 139 new settlements and 46,450 isolated houses would result from the new subdivision of land. Besides the national funds, newly established local authorities were entrusted with the handling of all technical aspects concerning land reclamation and resettlement. Far from being the mere result of political agreements, such an impressive and multi-faceted reform process stood at the intersection of cultural debates, national ambitions and foreign ascendancies that sought substantial alternatives to modernization and urbanization. This paper highlights an off-radar case study, with the aim of presenting and understanding some of the aspects featuring in the Italian discourse on rural planning. It deals with the intervention of the Bradano Valley Land Reclamation Authority and its main consultant, Nallo Mazzocchi Alemanni, and frames their efforts in the larger and multifaceted postwar Lucanian experience. Inscribed in the contemporary debate on regionalism and planning, the technical stance of Mazzocchi Alemanni would provide the foundation upon which to unfold the interweaving of contradictory ideologies deployed by intellectuals and activists seeking to uplift the Italian Mezzogiorno.

The One-shot Sequence and the Rhetoric of the Gaze in Contemporary Italian Cinema and the Films of Paolo Sorrentino

The one-shot sequence – the articulation of an entire scene through a single, unbroken long take – is one of the cinema’s most important rhetorical devices and has therefore been much used and widely theorised over the years. This article provides a brief overview of these theories and of the multiple ways in which the one-shot sequence has been used both in world cinema (in general) and Italian cinema (in particular) in order to contextualise its use by one of Italian cinema’s best-known and most significant practitioners, Paolo Sorrentino. Through close analyses of one-shot sequences in Sorrentino’s films L’uomo in più/One Man Up, Le conseguenze dell’amore/The Consequences of Love, This Is the Place and Il divo – La vita spettacoloare di Giulio Andreotti – the article argues that Sorrentino’s predilection for the device is best explained by the wide variety of functions that it serves (as a mark of directorial bravura and auteur status; as a self-reflexive device and meditation on the cinematic gaze; as a political tool; and as a means of generating emotion). While rooted in history, Sorrentino’s use of the one-shot sequence thus transcends its position within Italian film history and discourse.

History’s Flagstones: Nuruddin Farah and Other Literary Responses to Italian Imperialism in East Africa

In this essay I revisit Nuruddin Farah and argue for the importance of reading his work in conversation with the work of so-called second-generation Italian migrant writers like Igiaba Scego, Ubax Ali Cristina Farah, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, and Gabriella Ghermandi. I present an argument for viewing these writers as part of a transnational and translinguistic tradition of novel writing which responds to Italian imperialism in the Horn of Africa both during the colonial and neo-colonial periods. Nuruddin Farah's internationally acclaimed voice is part of a multilingual diasporic postcolonial tradition with an urgent ethic of remembrance and redress focused on Italian colonial discourses and the history and stories of the victims of Italian imperialism. This is an element of his work which has been seen as peripheral in Farah scholarship in the English-speaking Academy, while Italian scholars have noticed Farah's links with Italy but failed to recognize their importance or draw his work in a meaningful way into studies of Italian postcolonial literature. This state of affairs arises out of a failure to take a transnational and translinguistic view of what is essentially a novelistic tradition born in exile. This essay cannot pretend to be a comprehensive comparative reading of these writers; instead, it presents an argument for the urgency of such a reading. I show that Nuruddin Farah, despite his choice to write in English, is one of the most important contributors to the tradition of postcolonial Italian literature. I understand this to be not a national literature that is necessarily written in Italian, as has traditionally been the case, but rather as literature that contributes towards, to use Ato Quayson's terms, postcolonializing the Italian cultural sphere.

The English Way to Italian Socialism: The PCI, ‘Red Bologna’ and Italian Communist Culture as Seen through the English Prism

This contribution analyses the British perception of Red Bologna during the seventies and eighties, when politicians in the UK thought of Bolognese Social-Democrats as an example of good government. Maccaferri investigates the way in which the British political debate and the intellectual public discourse (as seen in journals, pamphlets and books) ‘imported’, deconstructed, adapted and appropriated the Italian communist model. The aim is to cast light on an ‘Italy Made in Britain’ that was constructed in the prevalently left-wing British political debate between the mid-nineteen seventies and the late nineteen-eighties, namely until Italian Communism started to search for a new name and a new identity, and, indeed, it liquidated the model itself. This article considers the debate expressed in the pamphlet Red Bologna (eds Max Jaggi, Roger Muller, Sil Schmid, 1977), journals such as Power and Politics and The New Left review, and newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer. Furthermore, it focusses on the resurgence of leftist intellectuals. It deals primarily with Marxism Today’s Italian discourse. By focusing on such a view, Maccaferri reconstructs the way in which, whilst engaging with the Thatcherite period, the English political debate and intellectual discourse perceived and constructed a very different kind of Italy that was simultaneously revolutionary and communist in its ideology and ‘moderate’ and socialist – if not liberal – in its policies.