Iperstoria is a Class A multilingual, international, blind peer-reviewed biannual journal focusing on English and American Studies with a multidisciplinary / transdisciplinary approach.
Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università degli studi di Verona
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In an era of increasing public skepticism towards businesses and institutions, organizations are under growing pressure from stakeholders to be transparent and trustworthy in their disclosures. The ability to communicate openly and honestly with stakeholders has become vital for success. Transparency ensures that the information shared is accurate, comprehensive, and accessible, allowing stakeholders to make informed judgments about a company's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts. Trust, meanwhile, is the cornerstone of effective communication; built through consistent and honest interactions, it is essential for maintaining stakeholder confidence and support. This special issue delves into the pivotal roles of transparency and trust in corporate communication, shedding light on how these aspects contribute to corporate credibility. Transparency enables organizations to demonstrate accountability, creating a positive impact on organizational reputation and fostering stronger relationships with stakeholders. Additionally, trust helps in enhancing stakeholder engagement, ensuring they feel valued and informed. Together, transparency and trust form the bedrock of robust business communication strategies, enabling organizations to navigate the complexities of modern corporate environments effectively. By prioritizing clear and honest exchanges, companies can build a solid foundation for long-term success and sustainability. This issue explores various strategies and approaches for enhancing transparency and trust, highlighting their significance in shaping corporate communication practices that resonate with stakeholder expectations and promote organizational integrity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Franca Poppi, Marina Bondi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy. Ali Dehdarirad
Review of “From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy by Ali Dehdarirad.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Petrelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines the complex interplay between colonial exploitation and Indigenous resilience through the lens of tobacco species in the Pacific Northwest contact zone (1770s-1820s). Analyzing Eurocentric narratives and Indigenous responses, it critiques colonial ideologies that framed Indigenous tobacco practices as “primitive” while ignoring ancestral permaculture and spiritual traditions. Influenced by Orientalist and Eurocentric hierarchies, European explorers and fur traders dismissed native tobacco species like Nicotiana quadrivalvis and attenuata as inferior to industrially bred varieties, weaponizing addictive colonial tobacco to manipulate trade and foster dependency. However, Indigenous communities – including the Haida, Interior Salish, and Coast Salish – negotiated, adapted, or resisted these impositions. While some integrated colonial tobacco into “moditional” practices, blending traditional and introduced elements, others upheld prohibitions or repurposed the plant within spiritual and medicinal frameworks. The article highlights how colonial accounts, shaped by exploitative agendas, obscured Indigenous agency, permacultural knowledge, and pre-existing intertribal trade networks. Simultaneously, it reveals Indigenous resilience through oral histories and ethnobotanical evidence, challenging settler narratives that conflated cultural adaptation with assimilation. By interrogating sources from fur traders, missionaries, and Indigenous Knowledge Givers, the study exposes the enduring legacy of colonial tobacco in reshaping power dynamics, ecological practices, and cross-cultural perceptions. Ultimately, it argues that the “myth of the Smoking Indian” emerged from a deliberate colonial erasure of Indigenous sovereignty over tobacco, reinforcing white supremacist ideologies even as Indigenous communities asserted autonomy over their botanical traditions. This research reframes the contact zone as a contested space where tobacco became both a tool of colonial coercion and a medium for Indigenous survivance.
Articles (general section) - American language, literature, and culture
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Tarsia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Enhancing Socio-pragmatic Competence through Storytelling
This study, addressing gaps highlighted by Lucarevschi (2016), investigates learners’ oral narratives and the role of discourse markers (DMs) in enhancing grammatical and socio-pragmatic competence in English as a Second Language (ESL). The research analyses a corpus of 36 narratives produced by upper-intermediate college learners. Participants were asked to narrate a weird event that happened to them. Then they were instructed on traits of spoken English (DMs included) and the phases of oral narratives (Labov and Waletzky 1967). Lastly, they were asked to re-narrate their stories. A mixed-methods analysis of DM occurrences was used, employing González’s (2004) taxonomy. Results show a statistically significant increase in the use of specific DMs after instruction (so, you know) and a gradual acquisition of informal conversational features. Comparison with native speakers’ narratives (González 2004) reveals learners’ alignment in DM range and pragmatic functions but differences in overall frequency and use, as the overreliance on so and and seem to suggest. The findings challenge the perception of DMs as language elements which do not need to be taught and advocate for their explicit inclusion in higher education ESL instruction to enhance coherence and socio-pragmatic competence. Limitations are acknowledged, especially in the monologic focus used. Further research on DM use in ESL conversational narrative contexts is suggested.
Articles (general section) - English language and linguistics
Acquisition of English as a second language
Copyright (c) 2025 Emilia Petrocelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Water Agency from Virginia Woolf to Jane Urquhart, Piloted Across the Atlantic by Rachel Carson
Moving from Rachel Carson’s studies on Atlantic oceanic currents – which have proven to be disastrous once they crash against the coasts of Great Britain in their circulatory movement from north to south and back eastwards, to the point of creating massive damages to human-made infrastructures, including lighthouses – this contribution analyzes first how this juncture is evoked in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), and second how this same theme is presented in the novel by Canadian author Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line (2010). Ever since Virginia Woolf iconized weather reports and weather conditions as indispensable frameworks for a day trip to a local lighthouse on the coasts of Britain, certainly long before climate change became a concern and nevertheless anticipating today’s ecological reasonings in an ingenious way, lighthouses have undergone major transformations. For instance, from being man-maintained – if not family maintained, as in Woolf’s novel – lighthouses have been computerized and completely deprived of human presence; above all, they are more and more targets to oceanic – increasingly devastating – surges, as happens in Urquhart’s novel. This matter-of-fact evidence necessitates to be discussed through the framework of the Blue Humanities. Amitav Ghosh with his essay The Great Derangement (2019), Rachel Carson with her Sea Trilogy, and particularly The Sea Around Us ([1950] 2021), and ecocritical blue ecology (Mentz 2024; Oppermann 2023; Regazzoni 2022) are among the references here considered for an ecocritical approach to the texts. This approach corroborates and reinforces Rachel Carson’s intuitions of seventy years ago, while showing their urgency nowadays. In conclusion, the interaction between oceans and lighthouses in the novels here analyzed, particularly if read through the lens of the Blue Humanities, inevitably leads to a new consciousness and a breach in our imagination of rising sea-level and on its more and more serious effects on our coasts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carmen Concilio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Recent work on data-driven learning manifests concern for the level of complexity that the use of corpora can entail, a complexity which – it is feared – may ultimately turn learners away from corpus interfaces in favour of the more discursive and user-friendly query strategies offered by AI. With this in mind, the primary aim of this paper is to trace the “journey of experience” of a hypothetical, relatively inexperienced, university-level user of the corpus management and analysis software Sketch Engine, in order to evaluate its plausibility as a resource for this type of user. Particular focus will be devoted to the Word Sketch option, following an analysis of the main differences between the query types Simple Query, Lemma Query, Phrase Query and Word Query. In this regard, it would seem that the issue of lemmatisation merits particular attention.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dominic Stewart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article analyzes how Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (2004) explores the ephemerality of US citizenship by providing examples of legislative ebbs and flows as they adhere (or not) to the constitutive story the nation makes about itself. Throughout the article, I will highlight how the Roths “fall from grace” from Americanness into Jewishness in the government’s eyes as they are gradually stripped of their rights as American citizens and progressively turned into aliens in their own home through a series of government initiatives, such as Just Folks, Homestead ’42, and the Good Neighbor Project. I will do so by framing these initiatives within a broader US legislative context, as well as by drawing parallelisms with historical instances that bear striking similarities to the same initiatives. I will also point out how the constitutive story of the nation framed within the novel should interact with the historical and contextual complexities around citizenship and its practices, thus showing how the novel provides commentary not only on the story the nation tells about itself, but also on how such a story can be improved.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Ilaria Tonelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article investigates the use of metaphors in arbitral awards, examining how these figurative expressions become embedded in legal reasoning and shape decision-making. Drawing on the pervasive role of metaphors in everyday language (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 3; Semino 2008, 1) and legal discourse (Winter 1989, 1222), the study acknowledges the influence of legal traditions on linguistic choices in arbitration texts (Gotti 2008, 232). It situates its analysis within the broader framework of genre theory, emphasizing the intrinsic link between legal discourse and its institutional and professional contexts (Bhatia, Garzone and Degano 2012, 1; Fairclough and Wodak 1997, 276). Using a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) (Partington, Duguid and Taylor 2013, 10; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2021, 1517), this research employs quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze arbitral awards drafted in English and sourced from the Jus Mundi database. The corpus, covering awards rendered between 2008 and 2023, is divided into two subcorpora reflecting the legal systems governing the arbitration: one consisting of awards governed by the laws of civil law countries (Italy, France, Switzerland) and the other by the laws of common law countries (UK, US, Hong Kong, Singapore). The study identifies key conceptual metaphors and examines how their usage reflects and reinforces the distinct legal cultures of civil law and common law systems. Findings reveal differences in metaphorical framing of legal principles and procedures, highlighting the nuanced interplay between metaphor and legal culture. By exploring how metaphors shape the discourse and interpretation of arbitration procedures, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersection between legal language and cultural traditions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ornella Guarino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Translation of Horror Splatter for Children in Italy
Shavit (1986) pioneered in treating children’s literature as texts received in the context of target literature, highlighting the specific constraints this genre faces and how these constraints lead to deviations from the source text. Taboo topics, such as sex and violence, are often excluded from children’s literature within a given society. Central to Shavit’s historical argument is the assertion that modifications to source texts align with prevailing notions of what is deemed educationally ‘beneficial for the child’ in the cultural context of the time. In recent decades, translators have tended to place greater trust in children’s ability to engage with differences; however, the adaptation of cultural details remains apparent, particularly in the translation of cultural references (e.g., food). What remains crucial is the role of the intended child reader in the translation process (O’Sullivan 2005) and its impact on the final product. In contemporary contexts, deviations from the source text have diminished, as exemplified by the Demonata Saga by Irish author Darren Shan, translated into Italian between 2007 and 2010. Unlike the Goosebumps series by American author R. L. Stine, Shan’s novels draw inspiration from splatter horror, and their success suggests that Gothic elements which gained popularity in adult culture are beginning to influence children’s literature as well (Buckley 2017). Shan utilizes tropes and imagery from splatter supernatural narratives, including demons that torment humans, themes of madness, and unsettling visions. This paper examines the translation of the first book, Lord Loss (2005), noting that it underwent no adaptations, which likely contributed to the series not being fully published; only six of the ten books in the series were translated. This assertion is supported by an interview with the author and the fact that the books are now out of print.
Copyright (c) 2025 Salvatore M. Ciancitto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Designing Prospective Professional Identities
This article explores multimodal meaning-making in a small corpus of 47 video curricula, recorded by undergraduate students in a Business English course at the University of Trento. The adopted methodology combines tools derived from genre analysis, multimodal analysis, and narrative analysis. The research question is the following: how do students select and integrate semiotic resources in a video curriculum to design their prospective professional identities? The results show that academic students as job applicants use a range of modes and modal resources (e.g., speech, eye contact, angle, icons, music) to design and communicate their future professional identities and to engage with their potential recruiter. A pervasive and noteworthy technique in the dataset is that of storytelling. Multimodally realized through speech, writing, gestures and other modes, storytelling is used to perform self-narration and to shape prospective professional identities. Hence, the examined multimodal texts show a tension between genre integrity and creativity, that is, between the adoption of standardised guidelines offered by tutorials and lectures, on the one hand, and more innovative and distinctive solutions, on the other hand. Prospective job applicants seem to pay particular attention to post-production elements such as keywords, icons, images, animations and less attention to mise-en-scène aspects including clothing style and setting.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sabrina Francesconi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Right to Language Assistance in Italian Criminal Proceedings
Court interpreting plays a critical role in ensuring effective communication during legal proceedings. This study explores issues related to language assistance services in Italian legal proceedings, focusing on the Direttissime division at the Milan Courthouse. Qualitative data were gathered through interviews with interpreters and professionals working at the courthouse as well as direct observations conducted in 2023. The interviews revealed systemic issues, including inadequate training, lack of legal expertise, and poor remuneration. Observations of courtroom proceedings also highlighted significant gaps in interpreter performance and organization, often compromising the defendant’s understanding and participation. Notwithstanding the inherent constraints of a singular case study, this analysis corroborates the notion that, despite the implementation of legal reforms, there has been minimal advancement in enhancing the quality of interpretation over recent decades. Therefore, this work calls for better training, assessment, and remuneration for interpreters, alongside more collaborative efforts among legal stakeholders to uphold the right to a fair trial for non-native speakers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Patrizia Anesa, Federica Cantagalli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Digital/Electronic Literature from the USA: Theories, Forms and Practices
Introduction to the special section of the Iperstoria issue “Digital/Electronic Literature from the USA: Theories, Forms and Practices.”
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrea Pitozzi, Mario Verdicchio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
English Language Teaching at the University of Milan
Language teaching in Italian universities traditionally played second fiddle to the teaching of literature until the end of the 20th century. However, a number of English language and literature academics in different Italian universities were also authors of English language textbooks aimed at university and secondary school students, adults, and teachers. At the University of Milan, between the 1960s and 1980s, Esther Menascè combined her interest in literary research with the development of English language teaching materials addressed to different types of learners: university students, self-study learners, and secondary school students. This paper aims to investigate how Menascè’s interest in linguistics and foreign language teaching methodology led her to design innovative materials to respond to the needs of Italian learners and teachers at a time of reform and change at all educational levels. The content analysis of the teaching materials sampled shows Menascè’s interest in conducting applied research into English language teaching. This is reflected in the scientific description of English, especially as regards phonetics and phonology, as well as in her principled adoption first of techniques belonging to an aural-oral approach in her books published in the 1960s and 1970s, and then to communicative language teaching in the 1980s. These are innovative aspects in Menascè’s materials production which make her stand out as an academic and a textbook author in the Italian context of her time.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea Nava, Luciana Pedrazzini, Emanuela Tenca https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper examines the advent of poetry performed by generative-AI voices. It proposes that these synthetic voices can cast a new light on literary historical understandings of the original performances through their minute differences. In places where the AI fails to fully achieve verisimilitude, there can be an “uncanny valley” effect, which allows listeners to hear the original performances anew, defamiliarized in the Russian Formalist sense of the term. The paper goes on to propose a phonetic comparison between the AI voices and the human voices they were trained on. By identifying a number of prosodic differences, the paper posits why the AI voice may sound similar but not quite right, leading to the uncanny effect. The intent of this machine-aided close listening is to further discuss the nuances of the human performances and their literary historical contexts, highlighting how the AI voice can support analyses of the original author performances.
Copyright (c) 2024 Chris Mustazza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Despite David Fine’s consideration of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1926) as the most ambitious novel about Los Angeles in the 1920s (2004), the novel received limited critical attention, except for an early reading of the novel as a debunking of Los Angeles’ crooked capitalist monopoly, and a recent renewed interest in ecocritical perspectives related to the oil industry and oil trade. Venturing beyond these two main threads, the essay offers a reading of the novel that focuses on human interaction with the Southern California flora and fauna and explores how human/animal relationships influence the social dynamics between the protagonists and oil workers. The analysis is thus structured in two main parts. First, it briefly situates the novel within literary transitions: as a “new frontier” novel and as one of the earliest examples of extractive fiction (M. S. Henry 2019). Second, drawing on “animality studies” (M. Lundblad 2013), it analyzes several instances of humans’ animalization and animality – the construction of the human/animal categories based on Darwinist-Freudian terms – and interrogates the application of the “survival of the fittest” discourse to the conflict of capital (oilmen) versus labor (socialist workers). Ultimately, it demonstrates that the conflict is instead resolved on the grounds of Christian piety and morality, due to the religious component with which the narrative imbues Socialism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Enrico Mariani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Transparency can be seen as providing access to more and better information, in ways that inevitably involve both informativity and accessibility, comprehension and comprehensiveness. It is difficult, however, to identify linguistic features that may be critical in the process, apart from generic appeals to avoiding ambiguity and vagueness. The present paper focuses on elements of accessibility and looks in particular at the use of exemplification. Keeping in mind work on strategies of recontextualization in popularising, exemplifications can be seen as a way of adjusting information to the readers’ knowledge and information needs by offering specific examples of general phenomena, clarifying general questions and adapting them to the audience. But how do exemplifications stand from the point of view of informativity and vagueness? The study is based on a corpus of Annual and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports in the rail sector. The corpus collects reports in English from different cultural backgrounds – including Native Englishes across continents and Non-native Englishes, whether English as a Lingua Franca or translation. The analysis of exemplification was conducted by identifying the various types of Vague Category Identifiers (VCIs) within the different forms of Exemplifying Markers, focusing particularly on the two main components of exemplifications: the General Element and the Exemplifying Element. This combined methodology allowed for a detailed examination of the dynamics between vagueness and exemplification, suggesting that exemplifications may increase accessibility but their informativity may vary and so can their contribution to transparency.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Bondi, Annalisa Sezzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The present paper discusses Michael Joyce’s CD-ROM-based hypertext novel Twilight: A Symphony (1996), written in the Storyspace hypertext writing program, as a case study and as part of a larger set of explorations and experimental practices in electronic literature during the 1990s. Examining this early form of hypertext literature adds to the historicization of the evolution of the American hypertext novel, while bringing to the fore the trans-/re-formative potential of the hypertextual form. While Scott Rettberg acknowledges the death of hypertext as a narrative form in the twenty-first century, he observes that “hypertext has provided a basis for other emergent narrative forms” (2015a,183), illustrating that hypertextual narrative forms and practices need to be constantly re-evaluated. Twilight occupies a very particular position in the hyperfiction evolution trajectory, as it appears to be on the threshold of a new era of hyperfiction that was about to emerge after its publication, paving the path for the diverse post hypertextual narrative formulations of the 21st century. The examination of Twilight leads one to the realization that hypertext, and by extension the American hypertext novel, even as a nascent genre, has continuously been reinventing itself by subverting its own form. Joyce extrapolates in his novel that hypertext is a dynamic narrative form in perpetual evolution, a fact to which Rettberg also calls attention. This paper aims to expose the ways in which Twilight paved the path to future literary genres and practices in American digital studies; it illustrates that Joyce’s novel interrogates certain features of early hypertext writing; it demonstrates how certain elements of the novel that differentiated it from other works written in Storyspace at the time can now be considered the original “kernels” of later experimentation in the field of electronic literature; and it emphasizes where these elements can be found again, albeit in new forms, in contemporary works.
Copyright (c) 2024 Vasileios N. Delioglanis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Taking the cue from some of Melville’s most intense epistolary exchanges with Hawthorne, this essay highlights the two writers’ different codes of heroics to revisit “the heroism of compromise” in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. It argues that this version of cultural heroism – allegedly, a unique aesthetic and political achievement of Hawthorne’s romances (Bercovitch 1993; 1991; 1988) – may in fact be reassessed within the broader debate on the novel as a romantic form of art in 19th-century aesthetics and genre theory. In Hegel’s terms, Hawthorne may be said to have dramatized the common “collisions” of the “novel in the modern sense,” so as to adopt and put the typical solution of the classical Bildungsroman (“the education of the individual in the actual world” and his/her reconcilement with “the order of things”) at the service of the American ideology. By so doing, he hybridizes his American romances with all the limits and aporias of the European novel. He transforms his New-World modern knights into Old-World-like middle-class conformists, exposing his plot resolutions to a contentious dispute over the balance of aesthetic gains and ideological losses in literature as cultural work.
Copyright (c) 2024 Giuseppe Nori https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Communicating Social Equity and Environmental Protection on the Corporate Websites of Gap Inc. and House of Hermès
This paper looks into the impact that business model, history and corporate culture might have on sustainability communication (Dunphy et al. 2000) and transparency (Wehmeier 2018; Rawlins 2009; Graafland and Nihof 2007; Graafland et al. 2004) in the fashion industry (Koskela and Crawford Camiciottoli 2020). The aim of this study is to identify (dis)similarities in selecting, presenting and communicating online contents about corporate sustainability on Gap Inc.’s international corporate website and House of Hermès, or Hermès International A.S.’s e-commerce and corporate website. In their sectors and segments (middle-mass/trendy vs. old luxury-super-premium/classic) Gap Inc. and Hermès are among the relatively high scoring companies on the Fashion Transparency Index 2020 (FTI 2020); the former is based in the USA, the latter in France. Whereas the analysis is embedded in the context of current discussion on organizational and communication transparency in business settings, we set the groundwork for a unified account of transparency in corporate website communication. Accordingly, we bring together insights from discourse studies, the tools of corpus linguistics for the digital written text around sustainability and related words in the domains of social equity and environmental protection on the one hand, and insights from research in webpage usability (Nielsen-Norman group) and multimodal studies (Bateman 2014) for content- and interface-design features, layout and text-image meaning co-construction on the other.
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Cacchiani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Transparency and Trust in the United States’ Response to and Attitudes about Climate Change
This article explores the concept of “climate transparency” in two related settings: in communication about climate change policy by US political elites and in public opinion among the US population. We consider the meaning of the term “transparency” and how climate transparency has risen to prominence in the worldwide effort to combat climate change. We then analyse two sides of transparency in the United States’ treatment of the climate crisis: what political leaders have said about climate transparency and how the public has perceived it. Our analysis combines two methodological approaches: linguistic corpus analysis and public opinion data analysis. The corpus, which includes speeches delivered by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, John Kerry and Al Gore at COP summits, illustrates how the United States has contributed to transparent approaches to fighting climate change. This analysis emphasises US political leaders’ usage of the terms “accountable,” “candid,” “honest,” and “transparent;” “fossil fuels” and “decarbonisation” (as transparency requires the problem to be named directly); and “science” and “scientists” (the source of information that needs to be shared transparently). Meanwhile, analysis of public opinion data from a large sample of Americans reveals that individuals who agree with the Biden administration on climate policy are especially inclined to view the administration as transparent and trustworthy, as are those who have confidence in scientists, liberals, and older, better educated, and non-white Americans. The corpus analysis speaks directly to the public opinion analysis, as we examine the circumstances under which leaders who prioritise climate protection are perceived as transparent and trustworthy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Denise Milizia; Laura R. Olson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Investigating Transparency in Corporate Discourse about Safety
Transparent communication is key to corporate reputation. Although greater public awareness has obliged firms to take a more proactive approach to transparent communication and disclosure, transparency remains an elusive concept and difficult to verify. This paper explores the characteristics of language which can act as indicators of transparency and focuses on the information about safety at sea provided by cruise and ferry operators in the relevant sections of the companies’ websites and their corporate reports. Following Schnackenberg and Tomlinson’s (2016) classification of the three dimensions of transparency, namely Disclosure, Clarity and Accuracy, the analysis adopts an eclectic, primarily qualitative approach to identify the linguistic and rhetorical features that contribute to or hinder transparency. The study takes into consideration the cognitive strategies adopted in the transfer of specialised and technical knowledge from expert to non-expert, which may give insight into the way information is rendered understandable and hence more transparent from the point of view of clarity. Another line of analysis is the use of vagueness, which could appear to move the discourse in the opposite direction, towards ambiguity, or even opaqueness. Whilst various rhetorical devices, such as cognitive strategies and FAQs, are found to enhance transparency, vagueness and highly evaluative language, typical of corporate communication, may impair it. The overall results of the analysis suggest that it is easier to identify the characteristics of the lack, rather than the presence, of transparency.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giuliana Diani, Judith Anne Turnbull https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We will herein identify and describe several kinds of difficulties encountered while creating an XML-TEI encoding of The Cantos of Ezra Pound. This long poem, notoriously difficult for the lay reader, presents equally complex puzzles for its editor to solve. One is linked with the openness of its form. An exemplary Modernist work, The Cantos displays virtuosic tendencies to question the received boundaries of the poetic form: its integration of peritextual elements, of prose quotations of various lengths, its unsystematic treatment of these “non-poetic” fragments don’t leave untouched the traditional ontologies that underlie the TEI’s standard representation of a poem. This questioning is pushed further, in the late sections of the poem, with the proliferation of non-Western writing systems (especially Chinese logographs), which not only contribute to dismantling the traditional order of reading but create (at the line, stanza and page levels) a new visual organization that must be accounted for with sui generis specifications of the TEI vocabulary. A third series of difficulties emerges with the delimitation of the numerous explicit quotations contained in the poem, whose extremely irregular typographical marking prevents any hope for automated annotation. In all these cases, we argue, the encoding involves an interpretive dimension, which must be made explicit in order to solve various doubts and hesitations and justify case-by-case decisions. Ultimately, we claim that it is only through an exhaustive, philologically-informed genetic enquiry into the dossier of The Cantos that a reasonably accurate digital edition will be produced.
Copyright (c) 2024 Robin Seguy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Text Generation and Other Uneasy Human-Machine Collaborations
Since the rise of mainframe computing, literary authors and critics alike have expressed anxiety about the computer’s ability to write narrative prose and poetry as well as or better than humans. With the recent emergence of publicly accessible AI authoring platforms such as ChatGPT these fears may appear to have been well-founded. In this article I will situate contemporary digital literary practices of reading, writing, rewriting, and performing computer-generated variable texts within broader social and historical contexts. Experimentation with generative, permutational, and combinatory text began long before digital computers came into being. How and why does experimentation with generative or in other ways variable text emerge within certain human and machinic generations? How do our attempts to make writing machines help us understand how we write ourselves?
Copyright (c) 2024 J. R. Carpenter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Rise of the “New Depression” in the Harper’s essay and in The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
In his 1996 essay “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” Franzen makes a public call for highbrow novels to rise to the challenges posed by the ‘therapeutic’ culture of the late twentieth century. As he explains, this culture is characterized by the tendency to pathologize psychological or emotional problems, which come to be regarded solely as symptoms to be treated with an instantaneous biochemical remedy. This phenomenon has induced an over-reliance on new-generation antidepressants. Such circumstances, I argue, are cleverly parodied in Franzen’s third novel, The Corrections (2001).
Copyright (c) 2025 Simona Porro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The aviation industry is notorious for its environmental impact. In response to growing climate change awareness, companies began reporting carbon emissions in the early 2000s to gain public approval. However, the information provided is often filtered to enhance public image, leading to concerns about transparency and greenwashing. This study examines Ryanair’s 2021 Sustainability Report to assess the transparency of its environmental policies and the sincerity of its language. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Hallidayan linguistics, the analysis focuses on how the language reflects the company’s attitudes and intentions. The term ‘transparency’ involves many contradictions, such as openness versus secrecy. While transparency is a valued ideal, preliminary results suggest that Ryanair’s report may construct a reality that serves the airline’s interests rather than reflecting genuine transparency.
Copyright (c) 2025 Franca Poppi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies have transformed the computer science discipline of natural language processing. However, generative AI retains the anthropomorphic model of simulating human narrative construction and verbal communication whereas, for artists, the ideational exploration is often more important than human mimicry or even plausibility in storytelling. It sometimes leads to generative experiments with non-verbal forms or events that have the potential to incite narratives through the audience’s experience of the works’ functionalities, backgrounds, and contexts. In this paper, we focus on such artistic approaches to narrativity. In five central sections, we discuss interrelated exemplars whose conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and other attributes anticipate or underscore the issues of contemporary linguistic automation based on massive datafication and statistical retrospection. In closing sections, we summarize the expressive features of these exemplars and underline their value for critically assessing generative AI’s cultural influence and fallouts.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dejan Grba, Vladimir Todorović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Metaphorizing the Discourse of Challenging Times
Afterword to the Special Section Discourses in Challenging Times.
Copyright (c) 2024 Denise Milizia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Emerging Trends in the Register of Persuasion Considering Appraisal in English
This paper discusses recent trends in the persuasion register in English. Such trends are linked to cultural differences and technological affordances, which also have an impact on social and professional practices (Bai et al. 2023; Matz et al. 2024; Kapantai et al. 2021). To this purpose, I first discuss the key concepts related to persuasive writing and their link to appraisal in English. Then, I focus on a sample of the most persuasive AI-generated writing extracted from a dataset released by Anthropic (Durmus et al. 2024) and available online. The methodology that drives this study is the appraisal system framework (ASF) by Martin and White (2005), the findings in ASF-based research on promotional texts (Pounds 2022; Ho 2021; 2011), institutional texts (Tupala 2019), academic texts (Hood 2010; 2006), and the research on complementary discourse systems for expressing stance and evaluation (Biber et al. 2019; 2018). The results show that the three groups of highly persuasive texts extracted from the Anthropic’s dataset present non-dissimilar word frequency ranges and a tendency towards the use of low-frequency lexis and appraisal resources. The application of the ASF demonstrates that the AI system Claude 3 Opus masters evaluation scales in English despite the well-documented inconsistencies of such systems in dealing with the numerical scales. The sample analyzed does not really follow the pattern of sparingly using appraisal resources while preferring invoked appraisal, which has been demonstrated to be a recent trend in the persuasion register. Nonetheless, it mostly maintains the proven culture-based recent trend regarding the scale of directness/indirectness (ASF Engagement). Finally, the ASF categories of Attitude, Graduation, and Engagement in the sample do not deviate from the attested function of propagating the meta-text/meta-discourse although with a caveat: they systematically construct semantic prosodies of extremes to persuade compellingly.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Zanfei https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Going on holiday usually encompasses several planning activities, one of these being how to deal with possible health issues. Covid-19 has made this aspect more prominent also due to the variety of restrictive measures adopted worldwide. Even though, according to the WHO, the pandemic is officially over, there are many other reasons why tourists may need to retrieve health-related information before and during their holiday. In this regard, one of the first sources prospective visitors are likely to consult are local tourist websites administered by public institutions and private companies. This paper presents a case study carried out on institutional tourist websites in the Veneto Region, a popular destination for both Italian and foreign visitors. The aim is to explore whether and to what extent these websites feature health-related information in Italian and how much of this information is made available in English. The paper presents a follow-up of two previous contributions (Cesiri 2021; 2019), which investigated tourism promotion before, during, and immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic. Starting from the results of these two studies, the paper considers institutional tourist websites in the aftermath of the pandemic. By adopting qualitative multimodal discourse analysis methods of investigation, the paper analyses the communicative strategies employed in these websites to assess whether the health-related information available is easy to retrieve. Of particular concern are the foreign tourists who might not be informed about the organisation of the national health system and the services it provides through the local institutions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniela Cesiri, Katia Peruzzo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Negotiating Pride and Vulnerability in Maud Howe’s Roma Beata – Letters from the Eternal City
Women’s travel narratives have long occupied an ambivalent position within dominant cultural frameworks, simultaneously supporting imperialist discourses and offering critical insights into ethnocentrism and cultural biases. This essay examines the intersections of domesticity, gender, and imperialism in Maud Howe Elliott’s Roma Beata: Letters from the Eternal City (1904), focusing on her portrayals of post-unitarian Italy (1884–1900). By positioning Howe’s perspectives within the broader transnational currents of 19th-century travel writing and its marketplace, this essay draws on postcolonial and gender theories to analyze her negotiation of the traditional American / Anglo-Saxon gaze on Southern Europe. At the same time, this essay pays attention to Howe Elliott’s complex relationship with emergent US imperialism and her own roots in New England’s culture, by adopting the emotional framing of pride and vulnerability. Finally, by emphasizing the critical interplay between domesticity and the imperialist thought, this essay explores Howe’s evolving engagement with the Italian scene (symbolized by the terrace of her Roman home).
Copyright (c) 2024 Agnese Marino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0