818 research outputs found
Il romanzo postcoloniale di Paul Scott
No full textPrefazione alla traduzione italiana del romanzo di Paul Scott, Staying On (1977),finanziata dal programma Cultura 2000 della Comunità Europea. Il romanzo racconta le vicende di un'anziana coppia inglese che rimane in India dopo la fine del British Raj
Un click, ed esisti per il mondo intero
No full textUn riflessione sulla rivoluzione antropologica introdotta da Internet
Shaping Hybrid Identities : A Textual Analysis of British Bhangra Lyrics
No full textThe article deals with a successful musical genre of the Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom. The fusion of Western pop sounds and traditional folk music original of the Punjab, British bhangra is in fact an original reinvention mixing old and new sonorities as well as Eastern and Western instruments, languages (Punjabi and English) and cultures.
The analysis of the lyrics of two bands – Asian Dub Foundation and Cornershop – has focussed on the distinctive linguistic features and discursive strategies which mark the encoding of British Asian identity and has compared the corresponding representations of identity-as-hybrid that emerge from the textual selection. In their own creative ways, both bands resort to ethnolects that work as in-group identity markers resisting complete assimilation by stressing difference. In both cases, peripheral representations, put forward by second-generation British youth and displacing conventional language (musical as well as verbal) from “inside out”, have been accepted into mainstream cultural production and allowed to participate in the interplay between dominant and marginal discourses, advancing new exciting ways of being British
From Hyde Park to the Planetary Garden: rhetorics of development at the London 1851 and Milan 2015 World Exhibitions
No full textThe article intends to suggest a comparative reading between the first world fair – the 1851 Great Exhibition – and the Milano Expo 2015, trying to retrace similarities as well as discontinuities in the repetition of the cultural practice of universal exhibitions by interrogating the present through the prism of the past. The purpose of such a cultural analysis is to map the complex interweaving of social expectations and mythologies in the act of their formation, paying special attention to the different rhetorics of development that characterise the staging of the Victorian and the Italian world fairs
From book to film: the semiotics of Jewishness in Oliver Twist
No full textThe article discusses the construction of Fagin the Jew in Dickens's novel and in David Lean's and Roman Polanski's films, underlying how representational choices are intetwined and converse with the corresponding cultural context from which a text arises. It thus provides a reflection on the impact of adaptation as a critical act
City branding and new media: linguistic perspectives, discursive strategies and multimodality
No full textThe book speculates on city branding in the public sector from a privileged linguistic, discursive and semiotic perspective, exploring how local administrations use new media in their communication agendas. Like nations and regions, cities have become aware of the importance of building a convincing reputation to engage their local and global stakeholders – residents, businesses, investors, tourists, students, sports and cultural organisations. Thanks to this wide potential reach, the city brand has expanded from a mere tourism strategy into a multifaceted tool of e-governance in the hands of local administrations and their civic partners by addressing key issues such as active citizenship, social inclusion and promotion of cultural heritage and mega-events like world fairs. This global phenomenon is retraceable to the growing conventionality of representational criteria and the standardisation of digital genres in contemporary urban policy discourses, thus illustrating the constant negotiation of local governments between the civic and the managerial
Political Humour in the Blogosphere
No full textA multimodal phenomenon combining multiple sign systems, net-mediated humour is structurally different from offline humour, as it takes place within the semiotic coordinates of a digital environment. No wonder, then, that an increasingly popular web genre such as the political blog should have been quick to exploit these new humorous text types and their richness of visual/verbal material in order to shape public opinion.
Two politically divergent blogs of the British blogosphere – Guido Fawkes and Recess Monkey – have served as case studies to illustrate the range of semiotic resources through which humour is triggered and to show how humorous narratives are constructed in an online conversation. At present, however, despite some degree of interactivity and user-generated content, this kind of political commentary still tends to replicate the typical top-down form of discourse of institutional bodies and mainstream news media that independent blogs should allegedly attempt to overcome. Humour, besides, can be highly ambivalent whenever it trivialises political debate or hides commercial interests, downplaying the social function of ridicule in favour of marketing goals
The magic lantern: representation of the double in Dickens
No full textThe book explores the double trope as a central area of Dickensian textuality in its relation to Victorian visual imagination and culture.
First, it analyzes Dickens’s rhetoric showing the double as a linguistic construction shaped by the conflicting forces of rationality and desire and invested with the force of multiple signification. Then, it focuses on Dickensian double characterization, which symbolizes the self as a mobile, ever-shifting energy field, modelled by a number of overlapping discourses, psychological, anthropological and historical. Next, it deals with the representation of urban space, seen as a structuring background suspended between history and dream and related to the equally dichotomous construction of the self, as it constantly emerges from Dickens's use of language. Finally, it investigates a few historical issues surfacing in the texts, such as the problematic encounter with several forms of otherness and the role of Empire, in order to show their psychological and political implications and the extent of their ambivalent commitment to Victorian ideology
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