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The exaltation of Italian national identity in the discourse of Matteo Renzi
74-95Views:209Nations are one of the most well-established constructs in our society, and they represent a very attractive benchmark for personal and social identification. Political speeches, as well as, for example, media discourse and popular culture, constantly reiterate myth, culture and history of nations in order to reaffirm and preserve their positive image, and this tendency doesn’t seem to be weakened by some contemporary events like globalization and the reinforcement of transnational systems.
As a proof of this trend, the present work proposes an in-depth analysis of the speech held by the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the European Parliament on the occasion of the inauguration of the Italian semester of presidency on July 2, 2014, aiming to demonstrate that also supranational contexts are exploited to reiterate national identity and priorities.
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How Socialism is Built: Metaphor and Ideological Interpretation in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Interviews for the Italian Press
34-48Views:157Using the tridimensional model of metaphor in communication (Steen 2008) multidisciplinary perspective (Musloff 2012, Steen 2011) in which cognitive notions are accompanied by political discourse analysis principles, this analysis aims to qualitatively describe the metaphors in the interviews fot the Italian press released between 1971 and 1981 by Nicolae Ceaușescu, a period in which the Romanian President had a notable international position. We will study the shorthand notes and the translations in Italian of five interviews published by the Italian newspapers «l’Unità» (Boffa 1971 and 1973), «Il Popolo» (Pellegrini 1978 and 1981), and «Corriere della Sera» (Petta 1981).
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Un esperimento didattico. Tre parole per Dante: esilio, desiderio, destino
8-16Views:383The article, starting from a brief reflection on Dante’s 2021 anniversary, attempts to offer an overall representation of the author Dante through a concentrated form that mixes scientific precision and brevitas, symbolic concentration and narration; the study therefore presents itself as an experiment that takes place halfway between public discourse and scientific discourse on Dante, in that intermediate area, of equally cultural and political value, which is teaching
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"Please, milady". The representation of the schoolmistress in literature and cinema: from Maria Messina to Alberto Lattuada
49-64Views:173This article aspires to open a new prospective of study on the figure of the schoolmistress in the first half of the Italian twentieth century. The essay focuses on three lesser-known narrative works (two by women writers), with a look at two movies of the 1940s and 1950s. The study offers a thematic analysis on the character of the schoolmistress, who is not always adequately recognized and analysed. In the first part, a group of three short stories is analysed: Maria Messina’s L’ora che passa (1911) revolves around an emptied and disillusioned teacher, Rosalia, who has not found the means to emancipate herself in her profession; Ada Negri’s Anima bianca (1917) instead presents a teacher, Rosanna, fully realized in her role to the point of letting herself die when an event undermines her ability to teach; finally, Federigo Tozzi’s Un’osteria (1920) opens a contemporary debate on the suffering of those teachers, like Assunta, forced to work far from home. In the second part of the essay the discussion shifts to cinema: Vittorio De Sica’s Maddalena... zero in condotta (1940) is the parable of the teacher Elisa Malgari, who has to learn the most important lesson: letting herself be loved by a man. Finally, Alberto Lattuada’s Scuola elementare (1954) opens a glimpse into the crisis of the substitute teacher Laura Bramati in search of her true professional identity.
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Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity
62-76Views:166Starting from the fundamental studies of the historian Giuseppe Galasso and in the context of a close confrontation with the most experienced European historiography on these topics, the essay reconstructs some issues of the italian national identity through the different guidelines of the historiographical debate from the nineteenth century to today in a comparative and historical setting of european modernity. The centuries-old duration of the events related to the process of formation of the Italian identity, from the tradition of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento and national independence, passing through the long domination of foreign powers, finally ended with the unification of the peninsula and the state-building in 1861. The most significant terms of the identity discourse are thus affirmed: territory and nation, whose underlying grounds, however, still struggle to find shared reasons for a unitary understanding of the national historical framework. In this respect the category of national identity starts its construction at the time of the Romantic ferments and remains intimately linked to those anthropological traits that would have provided to found in the mid-nineteenth century the community of Italians, finally rejoined under the frame of a new State. Not a single identity, therefore, but a multiplicity of references to the rich, centuries-old Italian cultural heritage, rethought in the light of a decisive season for national destinies.
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The evolution of referential and predicational strategies in parliamentary debates on Italian immigration laws
Views:235This article presents the evolution of the use of two words in parliamentary debates, immigrato and extracomunitario, frequently used in Italian language in reference to a foreign person entering the country with the aim of staying. The corpus consists of the transcripted texts of the parliamentary debates related to eight laws on immigration between 1986 and 2019, analysed with both quantitative and qualitative methods. Collocations and co-occurences with verbs and adjectives are taken into consideration, as well as figurative language.
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Sardinia of linguists and Sardinia for tourists: discursive consonances and dissonances at the beginning of the twentieth century
10-29Views:273The aim of this contribution is to tackle an already highly researched subject by adopting a fairly unprecedented perspective. I would like to concentrate on the representation of Sardinia in one of the most important historical moments for the construction of the image of the island in a modern perspective: the first decades of the twentieth century. I will try to make two apparently distant text types interact: tourist guides and travel reports written by linguists. I will focus on two prototype examples: on one hand the Reisebilder aus Sardinien by Max Leopold Wagner; on the other, the Touring Club Guide dedicated to Sardinia, written by Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli. My intent is to trace the similarities and differences of the two textual typologies in presenting a region at the time universally imagined (and narrated) as different, atypical and in any case "peculiar". In doing so, I will also try to highlight continuity and discontinuity with respect to the nineteenth-century representative methods.