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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Introduction to the Special Section “Parties, Luxury and American Celebrity: From Gatsby to Instagram.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Clericuzio, Cinzia Schiavini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Translating Tourism. Stefania M. Maci and Cinzia G. Spinzi
Review of Translating Tourism by Stefania M. Maci and Cinzia G. Spinzi.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Ivana Lorenzetti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. Sarah Ensor
Review of Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World by Sarah Ensor.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valentina Romanzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This contribution provides an overview of the recent events that affected the Department of Education as well as higher education in the United States since the beginning of President Trump’s second term. The second part of the article presents an interview with Ivy Wilson, Board of Visitors Professor at Northwestern University.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rachele Puddu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“What Does that Tune Mean?” Il significato della musica nei romanzi di Richard Powers. Stefano Franceschini
Recensione di "What Does that Tune Mean?". Il significato della musica nei romanzi di Richard Powers di Stefano Franceschini.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Petrelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Martin Luther King Jr. Ribelle nonviolento. Gabriella Lavina
Recensione de Martin Luther King Jr. Ribelle nonviolento di Gabriella Lavina.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valerio Spositi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Americani di seconda classe. La dialettica del Melting Pot in Louis Adamic, Carlos Bulosan e John Fante. Enrico Mariani
Recensione de Americani di Seconda Classe. La dialettica del Melting Pot in Louis Adamic, Carlos Bulosan e John Fante di Enrico Mariani.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francesco Chianese https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This study investigates how climate activism has been represented in two major British newspapers, The Guardian (2015-2023) and The Telegraph (2020-2023). Drawing on a purpose-built corpus of over 1.4 million words and employing a corpus-based discourse analytic approach, the research explores diachronic shifts and cross-newspaper differences in the portrayal of activist groups Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. The analysis focuses on the linguistic framing of activists in building the narratives surrounding climate action. Results reveal that The Guardian’s discourse has evolved from event-based reporting towards a more activist-centred and solidarity-driven narrative, increasingly linking climate activism to social justice issues and broadening its evaluative framing to include both supportive and more critical views. The Telegraph, instead, primarily frames activism in terms of disruption, legality, and public order concerns, without much emphasis on the activists’ social or ideological motivations. Word Sketch analyses of the terms activist(s) and protester(s) further confirm the different evaluative patterns and orientations of the two publications. The trends observed point to the need for further critical investigation of the framing of activists in the media and of its role in polarising public opinion, influencing the debate on policies and defining the role of protest in democratic societies.
Articles (general section) - English language and linguistics
Copyright (c) 2025 Gloria Cappelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The global geopolitical situation has been characterised by numerous crises in recent years, posing new challenges to EU governments and the US. Owing to the ensuing international instability, Trump’s inflammatory 2024 presidential campaign turned traditional rhetoric into an attempt to restore what he portrayed as the golden age. Set against this context, the present work analyses three main issues highlighted by the tycoon during the 2024 US campaign: the deteriorating effects of Biden’s administration, transgender people and immigration. To this end, 61 speeches delivered by Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign have been collected into a corpus and examined through the tools provided by Sketch Engine, with the purpose of discussing the semantic and metaphorical aspects of keywords and collocational clusters. Subsequently, drawing on Wodak’s (2011) theoretical frameworks, this research dwells on Trump’s employment of disclaimers, rhetorical strategies used to justify policies of exclusion in the name of national safety and identity. The identification of a specific lexicon offers insights into Trump’s metaphors, examined from the perspective of the conceptual blending theory suggested by Charteris-Black (2018) and developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). The analysis of linguistic and rhetorical elements builds on Wodak’s (2011) theories of discursive strategies to determine how Trump frames American society in dichotomic terms (Fairclough 2003). Finally, the study aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the tycoon’s replication of many rhetorical and linguistic strategies from his first campaign, his ‘bombastic’ 2024 campaign enabled him to gain momentum as a political celebrity and to be regarded as the forerunner of a return to the golden age.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michele Russo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Recent research has highlighted the potential of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to support the development of ESP writing skills. However, concerns have also emerged about learners delegating writing tasks to these tools, potentially undermining learners’ motivation and autonomy. LLMs’ capacity to generate human-like text challenges the ability to ensure the authenticity of EFL students’ writing. Some studies have investigated LLM-generated text characteristics, comparing them with student writing. However, research on LLMs in EFL education remains limited. This paper seeks to address this gap and advance critical understanding of LLM-generated text. It reports on a small-scale study comparing three corpora: genuine undergraduate EFL student essays, suspected LLM-generated essays, and texts produced by ChatGPT 4.0 and DeepSeek-V3. The study examined patterns of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in the essays. Combining quantitative analysis with qualitative interpretation, it was found that although interactive features have limited explanatory power in distinguishing between LLM-generated text and genuine student essays, LLMs place strong emphasis on explicit cohesion, coherence and logical organization, favoring an objective and factual style. Most importantly, while they approximate human stance-taking, LLMs show very limited capacity to model audience and engage readers. This pattern was mirrored in the essays suspected to be LLM-generated. In contrast, genuine student writing was found to display a more personal tone and substantially greater reader engagement, regardless of target language proficiency.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Bagni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Truman Capote’s Mid-Century Subversive Celebrity
Truman Capote is one of the most controversial American writers of the post-WWII years, gaining more attention and fame for his persona than for his literary output. Though his celebrity has lasted for decades and has grown at each new project, this paper concentrates on the years preceding – and the time of – the publication of his first novel in 1948. Portraying explicitly gender-bending characters, Other Voices, Other Rooms has fallen into the category of Southern Grotesque, a style that has sheltered his and other Southern writers’ output from the ostracism met by Gore Vidal’s contemporary gay-themed novel, The City and the Pillar. The paper thus addresses the nexus between sexuality and celebrity at a time when homophobia, in the United States, was at its highest peak. Capote’s exploitation of his personal queerness, mirrored in the novel, has granted him fast-track fame, confirming his ability to capitalize on the spectacularization of queer elements.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Clericuzio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Celebrity, Punk, Time, Nostalgia, and the Unpredictable Trajectories of Fame in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
The paper investigates the pursuit, the pitfalls and the unexpected trajectories of fame in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011). In the novel, celebrity, its pursuit and its loss are crucial in the main plot emerging from the thirteen interlinked storylines that delineate the countercultural context of the punk-rock scene from the 1970s to the present – most of which investigate the forms and meanings of celebrity in the transition towards the dematerializaton of experience with the advent of the new media. What is the relation between art, fame, and real and virtual identities in the transition from the “world of objects and venues” to the iPod era? Can celebrity be part of a countercultural universe, or can it be only a vicarious accomplishment? How are the vestiges of the old celebrity world reshaped in the era of instant fame? To what extent can artistic/aesthetic value shift from its content to its circulation and dissemination? The paper investigates celebrity and its corollaries at the turn of the millennium as depicted in Egan’s novel: the craving for eternal youth and the immortalizing thriving of fame and its symbols; the relation between fame and the celebrity’s body; the forms and fate of authenticity in the new mediascapes and systems of consumption.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cinzia Schiavini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The AIDS epidemic has always been closely connected to media representation, particularly with regard to the identification of AIDS as a gay problem, which the press established from the beginning. This equivalence heavily affected how AIDS would be perceived in popular culture. This article analyzes the dynamics governing a less investigated aspect of this intersection between AIDS and popular culture, that is, the triangle of 1950s Hollywood stars at the center of the mainstream narrative of the AIDS epidemic: Ronald Reagan, who held office during the worst years of the crisis, Rock Hudson, whose death in 1985 caused a shift in the visibility of the disease, and Elizabeth Taylor, who rapidly became the world’s best-known AIDS activist. While queer artists and activists did most of the heavy lifting (and of the suffering) when it comes to AIDS, this triangle of Hollywood stars managed to frame most of the mainstream narrative reaching those not directly affected, as their fame fed America’s interest in the epidemic. The article focuses on the dynamics at work that allowed the different aspects of American popular culture, mainly 1950s themes and anxieties surrounding sexuality and the Cold War, to intersect with AIDS media representation. Investigating the Hollywood triangle Taylor-Hudson-Reagan, the article highlights the discrepancies between the mainstream narrative and the underground queer narratives of the time, revealing how this tension shaped AIDS as the first pop culture epidemic.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Ferrari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Category is…“Opulence, You Own Everything!”
Sites of unique forms of relationality, 1980s ballrooms are portrayed in the tv show Pose (2018-2021) as sanctuaries of non-normative gender and sexual expression where NYC Black gay and transgender people who are shunned by society gather to have fun. In their celebration of the frivolous and the excessive, the balls appear utopian (Muñoz 2009) because they materialize the hopes and dreams of a marginalized collective with the ephemeral instantiations of joyful becoming in its most decadent expressions. Here, decadence does not just signal the utmost devotion to the self in its own search for jouissance, but is in fact the evidence of the abject’s very coming into being, of its dramatized subjectivation (Butler 1993) in an anti-Black world; decadence is a mode of Black queer performance that both encompasses and explodes social death as the ontological status and horizon in which Blackness is inscribed. Standing against the city’s racism and homotransphobia, all of which AIDS exasperates in the pathologization of the infected, the balls’ extravaganza and their obsession for the mundane suggest a turn to the ecstatic as a “pleasurable reckoning with everyday ruin in contemporary Black lives,” a critical invitation “to register and revere rapturous joy in the broken-down present” (Abdhur-Rahman 2018). Through an analysis of various scenes from Pose, this article explores the irreducible proximity of Black queer life and death and proposes a theory of decadence that reads the fabulous, the eccentric and the opulent as the ballroom’s specific response to that proximity, a response that informs not only the aesthetics of bodies, but the very modality of representation in contemporary cultural productions. Rooted in the subculture’s performances of realness, the Black decadent disavows mimetic representations of reality and substitutes its language with a complete surrender to the absurd of the narrative.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giuseppe Polise https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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
Celebrity and Disconnection in Joan Didion’s Hollywood Writings
In her 1979 non-fiction essay “The White Album,” Californian writer Joan Didion (1934-2021) describes her living on Franklin Avenue and the peculiar atmosphere in Beverly Hills during the summer of 1969. The infamous murders on Cielo Drive put an abrupt end to the hedonistic existence of Hollywood celebrities and “music people.” What Didion describes as an era of “paranoia” and “vortical tension” finds echo in her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays. Indeed, actress Maria Wyeth feels estranged in a life where vacuity and “nothingness” prevail. Going beyond the Hollywood novel tradition, Play It As It Lays not only focuses on the cinema industry, but the narrative also displays cinematic techniques and follows a film structure to convey the influence of media on Maria’s reality, that consequently accentuates her feeling of disconnection. This paper aims to analyze how Joan Didion’s own experience in the Hollywood milieu has permeated the narrative texture of her novel Play It As It Lays, especially in the portrayal of an alienating celebrity culture and the use of cinematic writing.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adélaïde Malval 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.
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
The Changing Discourse of YouTube’s About Us Page
The paper examines the evolving discourse of YouTube’s About Us page through a multimodal linguistic lens. It analyzes two iterations of the page (2019-2021 and 2021-present) in comparison with TikTok’s corresponding section, tracing how corporate self-representation is linguistically and visually constructed across time. The About Us page is approached as a multimodal genre (Garzone and Catenaccio 2021; Petroni 2020) in which linguistic, visual and compositional resources combine to construct corporate ethos and discursive identity. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 2007 [1975]; 1978), Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005), and Multimodal Ideational Mapping (Moschini 2022), the study focuses on the ideational metafunction as the axis through which experience is represented and specific worldviews are naturalized. Multimodal Ideational Mapping (MIM) is employed as an interpretive framework to trace how ideational meanings are distributed across language, image and layout, and how recurrent conceptual nuclei emerge through their intersemiotic alignment. By reinstating Halliday’s notion of context of culture as a historical and ideational environment, the analysis connects local semiotic choices to broader cultural scripts that inform platform self-representation. The findings suggest that YouTube’s corporate discourse underwent a partial reorientation after the global diffusion of TikTok in 2020: from a participatory and civic-oriented rhetoric associated with the Californian Ideology (Turner 2006; Barbrook and Cameron 1996) toward a mode of self-presentation increasingly grounded in aesthetic pleasure and emotional engagement.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ilaria Moschini 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.
Acquisition of English as a second language
Copyright (c) 2025 Emilia Petrocelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lynn Nottage’s one-act play POOF! (1993) centers on Loureen, a black woman who causes her abusive husband to combust by the power of her voice. In this essay, I employ a critical methodology informed by black time studies, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of Signifyin(g), and black feminist thought in order to interpret Loureen’s vocal revolt against intimate partner violence as a response to the demands of black patience, a race-based disciplinary device that functions as an antiblack instrument of white supremacy and as the conceptual framework to Julius B. Fleming Jr.’s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Like the theatre artists and activists of the Civil Rights Movement to whom Fleming devotes his critical attention, Loureen enacts an urgent demand for ‘freedom now’, refusing to perpetuate a performance of patience that conforms to the patriarchal demands for docility and deference rooted in US slavery. In doing so, she follows in the footsteps of Janie and Celie, the protagonists of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), respectively. By Signifyin(g) upon Hurston and Walker, Nottage situates her playwriting within the “web of filiation” (Gates 1988, xxii) that constitutes the African American literary tradition, and the “webs of affiliation” (Colbert 2017, 7) that link post-civil rights enactments of black freedom to those of earlier periods. Furthermore, she allows for the expansion of black time studies in an intersectional direction informed by black feminist thought, favoring an alternative deployment of the concepts of Afro-presentism and fugitive affect as advanced by Fleming in his study of performative acts of civil disobedience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valentina Rapetti 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