1,721,036 research outputs found
Capturing/Captioning Wildlife in Nature Photography
No full textThe Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is a prestigious international contest whose aim is to provide a showcase for the world’s best nature photography. Though essentially books of pictures, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year portfolios have always devoted great attention to the written texts. The study focuses on the captions that accompany the hundred pictures in the 26th edition of the Portfolio, which contains the photos selected in the 2016 competition and exhibited at the Natural History Museum in London from 21 October 2016 to 10 September 2017. These captions are an interesting object from a linguistic, and more specifically ecolinguistic, perspective. While witnessing how they differ from those in other prestigious books of nature photography, the analysis intends to highlight linguistic features, narrative patterns and rhetorical devices while connecting them to more specific issues of environmental discourse within an ecosophical framework
Representations of diplomatic discourse in the periodical press after Sir Rogers' resignation from UkRep to the European Union
No full textOn 3 January 2017, after wishing “happy New Year” to the government, Sir Ivan Rogers resigned from his position as UK ambassador to the EU, where he had been operating since November 2013. Had everything worked according to routine, he would have been appointed at least until October 2017, and he was likely to have his mandate further extended. In his letter of resignation, Ivan Rogers explained that he had decided to “step down” from UKRep so that a new appointee could be in place by the time negotiations about Article 50 would start. However, the letter also overtly expresses his opinion on the government’s conduct after Brexit: “My own view remains as it has always been. We do not yet know what the government will set as negotiating objectives for the UK's relationship with the EU after exit.” These remarks, as well as his rather unveiled criticism addressed to pro-Brexit ministers, have raised reactions both in the UK government and in the media. To be vehemently debated, even before his decision to depart, is not only the ambassador’s standpoint, but the alleged overstepping of his role, which, according to Theresa May’s spokesman, should have been that of reporting “the views of others.” (The Telegraph, 15 December 2016). Hence, this incident has brought to the fore, besides the conflict of opinions, also a conflict that involves the pragmatics of diplomatic discourse in relation to (domestic as well as international) political discourse
Modernity, experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
No full textIn Henry Adam’s riveting third-person autobiography posthumously published (The Education of Henry Adams, 1918) the concept of law is scrutinized in all its possible meanings. The moral law, the law of politics, the law of economics, the natural law, etc. are all regarded as – however tentative - closely interconnected ways of organizing experience which can throw light, at once, on universal issues and on historically determined, distinct features of American culture and society. He also explored therein the strict juridical meanings of Law, notwithstanding his paraleptic claims to ignorance on the subject, “outlawry as his peculiar birthright”, and “accidental education” acquired through direct experience rather than on law books and codes. The pupil of jurist Joseph Story at Harvard, the student of Civil Law in Berlin and Dresden and the author of pamphlets and essays on jurisprudential matters (“Chapters of Erie”, 1870; “The Anglo-Saxon Courts of Justice”, 1871, to mention but a few) Adams was in fact a learned and fine analyst who constantly attempted “to bring the case within a general law.” Covering the period between 1838 and 1905, however, he presented the Law as a principle which, along with the “democratic dogma” instilled to him by his father and grandfather, was rapidly decaying, due to the abrupt changes brought about by the Civil War and, more generally, by the ground-breaking scientific and technological discoveries of the time. He concludes that “the law altogether, as path of education, vanished in April 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a lawless world,” struggling to catch up with the multiplicity, diversity and anarchy of the modern world
"Towards what final grievous contemplation amid the disarray?": linguaggio e logica della fine dei romanzi di David Markson
No full textAutore marcatamente sperimentale, David Markson offre interessanti spunti di riflessione sul rapporto tra linguaggio e logica e tra linguaggio e morte. I suoi romanzi sono successioni di frasi interrotte da un doppio spazio, lunghi elenchi di personaggi, realmente esistiti o inventati, di cui si riportano idiosincrasie, aneddoti sulla vita o sulla morte. Su queste trame inesistenti o negate (si veda This Is Not a Novel) e partendo programmaticamente dal Wittgenstein del Tractatus e ancor più delle Ricerche filosofiche, Markson ci mostra le insidie del ragionamento logico e la fallacia del linguaggio stesso. A questo fine fa ampio uso di una sintassi criptica (cross-circuited schematism), della contraddizione, del condizionale controfattuale, della negazione, dell’interrogazione, dell’apocope, del chiasmo e dell’anticlimax. Le strategie retoriche si intrecciano a una poetica della morte come possibilità di un’impossibilità, con implicito riferimento a Heidegger e Derrida. Così concepita la scrittura, come la morte, diventa ripetizione, citazione, errore reiterato all’infinito, domanda senza risposta, ma anche potenzialità assoluta, A e ¬ A.
David Markson’s experimental novels offer interesting cues for a reflection upon the relationship between language and logic and language and death. The plots are non-existent or deliberately negated (as in This Is Not a Novel): merely a series of sentences divided by a double space, telegraphically reporting anecdotes concerning the lives and deaths of either real or fictional characters. The use of syntax and rhetorical devices – cross-circuited schematism, contradictions, counterfactual conditionals, negations, interrogations, apocopes, chiasmuses, anticlimaxes – is meant to underline the limits of logical reasoning and the fallacy of language. In this, Markson clearly draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, not only as the author of the Tractatus, but even more as the author of the Philosophical Investigations. In his poetics of death he also recalls Heidegger and Derrida’s aporias. Thus conceived writing, just like death, is repetition, quotation, infinitely reiterated error, question which remains unanswered; on the other hand, it is absolute potential, A e ¬ A
Massimo Bacigalupo, Angloliguria: da Byron a Hemingway: figure e scritture di '800 e '900 fra America, Inghilterra e Liguria (Genova, Il Canneto, 2017)
No full textJulian Stannard, SOTTORIPA. GENOESE POEMS / POESIE GENOVESI, traduzione di Massimo Bacigalupo, Il Canneto Editore, Genova, 2019 [2018] (seconda ristampa)
No full text“Un ragazzo inglese arriva a Genova nel 1984 e di lì a poco diviene uno dei
tanti lettori di lingua madre più o meno precari assunti dalle università della penisola. Scopre la città, scopre Sottoripa”. Così, nell’introduzione intitolata “Le veglie genovesi di un bohémien inglese”, Bacigalupo presenta Sottoripa.
Poesie genovesi (p. 5). L’elegante volumetto blu polvere, in formato 150 x 180, emblematicamente illustrato con le quinte fotografiche di Martina Bacigalupo (sipari di lisi broccati tra colonne doriche, antri di palazzi genovesi dove losanghe prospettiche si incontrano con ceramiche turche, alberi inarcati su piazze lastricate, vedute di caos urbano con il mare sullo sfondo), contiene una sessantina di poesie di Julian Stannard con traduzione a fronte di Massimo Bacigalupo tratte dalle raccolte La guerra di Rina (Rina’s War, 2001), La zona rossa (The Red Zone, 2007), I pappagalli di Villa Gruber scoprono i lapislazzuli (The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli, 2011), Vico dell’amor perfetto e poesie aggiunte (The Street of Perfect Love and Added Poems, 2014)
Augmented Bodies: Functional and Rhetorical Uses of Augmented Reality in Fashion
Full text linkAugmented Reality (AR) is increasingly changing our perception of the world. The spreading of Quick Response (QR), Radio Frequency (RFID) and AR tags has provided ways to enrich physical items with digital information. By a process of alignment the codes can be read by the cameras contained in handheld devices or special equipment and add computer-generated contents – including 3-D imagery – to real objects in real time. As a result, we feel we belong to a multi-layered dimension, to a mixed environment where the real and the virtual partly overlap. Fashion has been among the most responsive domains to this new technology. Applications of AR in the field have already been numerous and diverse: from Magic Mirrors in department stores to 3-D features in fashion magazines; from augmented fashion shows, where models are covered with tags or transformed into walking holograms, to advertisements consisting exclusively of more or less magnified QR codes. Bodies are thus at the same time augmented and encrypted, offered to the eye of the digital camera to be transfigured and turned into a secret language which, among other functions, can also have that of becoming a powerful tool to bypass censorship
Dubbing Camp: Le ragazze del Pandora's Box vs Stage Mother (2020)
Full text linkTransgender characters have been widely represented in films, both through the visual mode, by exploiting the flamboyant theatricality of drag queens, and verbally, by reproducing a provocatively excessive and humorous gayspeak “bordering on what is popularly known as camp” (Ranzato 2012). Released in 2020, Stage Mother (directed by Thom Fitzgerald) received some negative reviews on the ground that it was “dated and formulaic” (Taylor 2020), reminding us of issues about gender that were at the core of many films produced in the 1980s-90s, such as Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994). The reference is significant, as in those same years also in Film Studies camp and transgender started to be “alternatively used for identity construction and for critical deconstruction” (Vallorani 2015: 59). Focusing on orality, phonetic and pragmatic features of so-called gayspeak were both questioned and confirmed (cf. Henton 1989; Cameron 1995; Barrett 1997; Hall and Livia 1997; Zwicky 1997 among others), acknowledging the role played by language in gender performance. The idea of camp as “acting within acting” (Hayes 1976; cit. in Ranzato 2012: 372) triggers a metadiscourse on orality which finds in film dialogue and audiovisual translation interesting fields of investigation. This paper compares the rendering of camp talk in Stage Mother (Thom Fitzgerald, 2020) and in the Italian dubbed edition Le ragazze del Pandora’s Box, highlighting pragmatic and cultural processes that are at work in both versions
Augmented Linguistics. Language and Communication in the Age of Augmented Reality
No full textComputer-mediated communication, especially in its latest developments (Web 2.0, Augmented Reality systems, tagging-based standards) seems to call for a radical rethinking of the basic tenets of linguistics. The Gricean maxims of quantity, quality, relevance and non-ambiguity have deeply been shaken by these forms of verbal and visual exchange. The boundary between the world and the web has increasingly become a thin and permeable membrane: the real and the virtual environments have mixed so inextricably that it is no longer possible to discuss them in terms of mutually-exclusive dimensions. In our deeply-layered and mixed world fundamental issues like semantic continuity, indexicality and figurative language need to be re-defined. After a general overview on how linguistic assumptions – with particular regard to pragmatics - have been transformed by the existence of hybrid ecosystems, the book also focuses on the phenomenon known as “tagging”, which has once and for ever established a constant isomorphism between the net and the planet. Tagclouds are the most significant example of how texts can embody Grice’s maxims from this new perspective
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