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The paper analyses the military invasions and demographic engineering perpetrated by the Republic of Turkey in the Syrian Arab Republic from 2016 to 2024. In particular, it focuses on the lasting effects of the 2018 and 2019 invasions to address the following question: Which identification process is more relevant to understan- ding the Turkish operations and the related demographic change? To support this analysis, the study utilises documentary and ethnographic qualitative resources. After outlining the sources and their limitations, the paper sets forth the methodological, theoretical and terminological tools used, later clarifying the historical context of the ongoing conflict between the Syrian national army, supported by Turkey, and the Syrian demo- cratic forces that Turkey aims to neutralise. Grounded in processual-relational thinking (p-rt), this study seeks to provide a new and original categorisation of the relevant identification bundles. It proposes moving beyond the categories of “culture” and “ethnicity”, which are often vague and reductionist, and instead distinguishes between “ancestral” and “hermeneutic” identification bundles. The former is defined by normative horizons tied to inherited commonalities that relate to language, customs and religious denominations, while the latter encompasses unique interpretations of these legacies through political programs and legal commitments. Based on the gathered evidence, the research assesses which of these bundles is more relevant to defining the conflict between the SNA and the SDF and the ensuing demographic engineering process. While both bundles prove relevant, the hermeneutic bundle emerges as preponderant. Keywords: Demographic Engineering, Identification bundles, Ethnicity, Rojava, Turkey

The aim of this paper is to highlight an aspect of Mozart's production that has long been neglected by contemporary musicology: the strong influence of Orientalism in some of the composer's works. After a brief focus on musical antecedents related to Orientalism, mostly composed in France, Austria and Germany, we will then examine four of Mozart's most famous works in more detail: the Violin Concerto in A major K219, the Piano Sonata in A major K331 and the two renowned Singspiele: Die Entführung aus dem Serail K384 and Die Zauberflöte K620. For each of these works, all of them replete with Turqueries and exotic elements, different aspects will be examined with the aim of providing a multifaceted review of the main manifestations of Orientalism in European musical production of the 18th century. It is worth clarifying that what will be examined constitutes the original core of a series of elements that, in Art music production of the following centuries, will become a compositional norm with explicit reference to the Middle East, although derived from cultural and musical stereotypes. Furthermore, when discussing the East in a musical context, we do not refer to well-defined geographical and cultural boundaries. In this paper, we will also offer a brief analysis of this highly stereotyped and antithetical Eastern world, from a perspective strictly linked to the musical context, but one whose influences also partially extend to literature and visual arts.

The aim of this paper is to explore the presence of Cultural References in animated films and to investigate the approach adopted by Italian dubbing professionals to deal with such culture-specific elements. The analysis is based on a corpus of twelve American animated films released between 1955 and 2018 by companies such as Disney, Disney-Pixar, DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, Illumination Entertainment, Universal Pictures. By analysing the transcriptions of the English and Italian dialogues and the films, the paper identifies food and drink Cultural References and examines the translation strategies used in Italian dubbing. A comparison of older and more recent films throws light on differences through time as well as on translation patterns. The linguistic analysis of the English and Italian dialogues is complemented with comments by two Italian dubbing professionals on dubbing practice in Italy.

Using W. J. Thomas Mitchell’s concept of the “pictorial turn” as a starting point, this paper assesses the impact of the digital world and new media on the body of current migration narratives within the field of anglophone postcolonial literature. In a culture dominated by images, new media, particularly the Internet, have increasingly complemented written language as the primary means of conveying storytelling. In regard to migration narratives, as it happened at the dawn of cinematography when the human face attained a multidimensional, visual and emotional focus, this shift in the messenger has conferred a digital life to the human face itself. Given this new media reality, the human face is now able to communicate simultaneously across distances, across time and to a wider audience. This quality, referred to as “facialization” by Thomas Macho, enables individuals to take a predominant role as real-life protagonists in their own real-life stories engendering in return an online community. Furthermore, as put forth by Hilde C. Stephansen, this online community also takes a stand against the mainstream narrative of present-day migrations and directs attention to marginalized human beings prevented from entering Western societies. In this paper, these real-life stories are explored in the visual-digital storytelling by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of her experience as a migrant; by Reni Eddo-Lodge as a descendant of earlier migrants; by Lucy Popescu as an activist working for the publishing industry as well as by activists engaged in the Refugee Tales Statement. This visual-digital production of migration narratives and their consequent availability also render the human rights issues facing stateless persons pressing and immediate.

While European borders have increasingly hardened since the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, practices of migrant assistance and solidarity by civil society actors have become a feature of contemporary border politics. On the one hand, across the European Union, local and international initiatives have often responded to needs of newcomers, by playing a pivotal role in doing humanitarian work; on the other hand, both organisations and individuals engaged in migrant solidarity and assistance have become the target of policies and practices of criminalisation. My analysis takes the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla as a case-study, drawing on data collected during a 2019-2020 fieldwork. The paper argues that in the Spanish enclaves’ local humanitarians belonging to a range of civil society actors face different forms of intimidation and indirect pressure, both by governmental and non-governmental actors. I show how the lack of acceptance of the work of local humanitarians among some sectors of the local population lies with feelings of ‘fear’ and rejection towards some specific groups of migrants, such as unaccompanied minors from Morocco and young male migrants from Sub-Saharan countries. In addition, I describe how, along this EU external border, cases of harsher forms of criminalisation have been recorded as well. The paper concludes that tensions and hurdles that local humanitarians face in these EU border localities partially reflect a broader European trend and are a ‘sub-product’ of larger process of criminalisation of migrants and refugees travelling through irregular routes. Humanitarian border – Migrant solidarity - Civil society organisations – Ceuta – Melilla – Criminalisation

The article discusses recent developments that are impacting the understandings of citizenship in late modern societies. During the past decades, citizenship has been discussed in terms of its contributions to tackling effects of political, social and economic crises. Most prominent are those challenges deriving from processes of Europeanization and globalization, but also, digital technologies are said to impinge new requirements on individuals, thus calling for European, global or digital citizenship. Well beyond simply changing the traditional orientation towards a nation-state, new conceptualizations of citizenship gravitate heavily towards individual dispositions and subjective competencies, while legal-juridical features remain untouched and largely unrelated. This explains the strong emphasis on the role of education in cultivating – global, European, digital – citizenship among individuals. The contribution asks whether and if so, how changed understandings of citizenship may lead to ‘performative citizenship’, where individuals are burdened with the requirement of constantly enacting ‘good’ and ‘worthy’ citizenship. The paper is organized along three sections: First, we revisit the mainstream literature on citizenship and discuss the main elements in historical-systematic manner. Second, based on a thorough literature review we discuss recent developments that call for updated meanings and representations of citizenship, before, third, the paper deliberates on the performative nature on newer conceptions of citizenship by examining recent examples of so-called global universities. The article closes with a discussion of research avenues for the topic, including crucial questions as to the status, role and function of citizenship in times of crises.

“Dancing with Dharma”: making wise choices in audiovisual translation in the first Students’ Symposium “Wise Choices in AVT”. During the First Student Symposium on Audiovisual Translation, organised by the West University of Timișoara, five universities, including the University of Turin, were asked to work on the 2022 British short film “Dancing with Dharma” (Sukanya- Devika.K. Jhala). In February 2023, the students involved were asked to produce subtitles, SDH (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) and audio description (for the blind and visually impaired) in their mother tongue. The team decided to use the subtitling software Ooona Tools, the AD software ADauthor, and the Netflix guidelines. The final aim of the project was to promote the teaching of audiovisual translation in Universities and to evaluate the different results in various languages: Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian and Romanian. After 5 months, the results were discussed at a conference held in Timișoara, Romania, on June 13th, 2023. In this paper, two of the Italian students involved in the project discuss the translation challenges encountered (the problem of textual fidelity and loss of information, and the translation of humour, wordplay and cultural references) and comment on the final result.

This paper revisits Walter Benjamin’s unpublished “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus,” one of relatively few texts Benjamin is known to have written in 1922, European modernism’s widely recognized annus mirabilis. The announcement followed numerous, transformative essays and fragments of 1921 and was written alongside his dissertation on The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, encompassing a pivotal moment in Benjamin’s philosophical maturation. Heralding the new, never realized journal, the announcement articulates what might be deemed “the task of the editor,” which it describes as a quest for “philosophical universality”. The Angelus Novus journal would proceed form the fact of modern social discontinuities toward the elaboration of universal philosophical truths through the criticism of literary works. This paper reconsiders Benjamin’s editorial ambitions as part of his individual philosophical development and within a broader context of “total modernism,” discussing the announcement’s continued relevance for our contemporary world.

Research on multilingualism and intercultural communication has been gaining large recognition. However, a number of subject areas are still largely underexplored. For example, verbal communication is prioritised while little emphasis is given to the multimodality of multilingual and multicultural interactions. Also, while some studies focus on the role of gestures in intercultural communication, elements such as gaze, physical contact, and time are far less researched. However, the lack of attention to some non-verbal elements can create misunderstandings, particularly when people share a spoken code only partially, as is the case with non-native speakers. Thus, non-verbal language should be given a wider scope in multilingual and intercultural research. This paper is a preliminary investigation of how intercultural differences in the use and interpretation of non-verbal codes of communication can affect interactions between migrants and social workers in Italy. The focus is on gaze, physical contact, and time perception and organization. The paper provides a qualitative analysis of focus groups and online questionnaires submitted to social workers working in northern Italy and supporting migrants in their daily integration in the society. The results show that the use and interpretation of gaze, physical contact and time vary considerably depending on the individual migrant as well as their culture of origin. Considerations are drawn on the extent to which cultural differences in the interpretation of non-verbal codes can create misunderstandings and undermine migrants’ integration. Keywords: Intercultural communication; non-verbal communication; migration; gaze; physical contact; time

Il lavoro analizza il principio di solidarietà espresso dalle misure dell’Unione Europea e dell’Italia durante l'emergenza sanitaria, per comprendere se siano congruenti alla definizione di solidarietà e se rispondano al soddisfacimento dei bisogni degli individui, secondo la piramide di Maslow. Parole chiave: Solidarietà, Bisogni, Piramide di Maslow, Emergenza Sanitaria;,Unione Europea The paper proposes an analysis of the measures enacted by the state for the Covid-19 health emergency in order to understand whether they are congruent with the definition of the principle of solidarity and whether they meet the needs of individuals, as articulated in Maslow's pyramid. Keywords: Solidarity, Needs, Maslow's Pyramid, Health Emergency, Self-realisation

The article explores the transnational dimension of adhocratic governance through the case study of the Turkmen community in Lebanon, a marginal and seemingly insignificant group, especially from a demographic point of view. It investigates how Turkey’s and Lebanon’s governance of Turkmen communities has evolved over the past few decades and what this reveals about how the Turkmen’s transnational identities operate in practice. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted by the authors in both Lebanon and Turkey, the paper contends that in recent years, Turkey has implemented ad hoc strategies towards Turkmen communities, influencing their transnational identification practices. While Lebanon has disengaged from the management of a population living in marginal yet strategically relevant areas, Turkey has framed its foreign policy in terms of cultural-religious kinship and pragmatism. Both political processes are continually characterised by competing bundles of identifications, which temporarily and incompletely acquire a privileged status in (especially foreign policy) decision-making. Keywords: Lebanon, Turkey, Transnational Identities, Adhocracy, Transnational Governance, Kinship

What are the current dominant threats and fears in Lebanon? How do the borderland communities perceive these threats, and how are they impacting their identity construction? This paper explores the interplay among identity, borders, and fear by examining three regimes of fear that are dominant narratives provided by state institutions and Hezbollah: the threat posed by Israel, Salafi-jihadists, and Syrian refugees. These regimes resonate differently in the Northern, Eastern, and Southern borderlands. Interviews with local residents reveal a shared but unnamed fear of marginalization while also highlighting an alternative identity construction in each of the borderland regions. Keywords: Borderlands, Fear, Identity, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Israel, Salafi-jihadists, Syrian refugees

Centred around six exceptional Danish linguists: Vilhelm Thomsen, Otto Jespersen, Kristian Sandfeld, Louis Hjelmslev, Knud Togeby and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, this paper analyses the development of linguistics in Denmark from mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century. The paper makes evident that these linguists, through their scholarship, research area, choices and methodology, together with their reciprocal interactions and joint affiliations, had a strong influence on the evolution of Danish linguistics.

It is a well-known fact that J.R.R. Tolkien’s training as a philologist had a very strong impact on his work as a creator of languages. This paper aims to identify the influence of Tolkien’s academic background in the field of linguistic studies on the creation of his Elvish languages. Taking into account Tolkien’s earliest works on Qenya (the first of the Elvish languages to be conceived) and based on our knowledge of Tolkien’s readings in linguistics and philology, the paper analyses some peculiar uses by Tolkien in describing the language and traces them back to their likely sources. The aim of the paper is twofold: on the one side, it hopes to show that this kind of source criticism can lead us to a better understanding of Tolkien’s conception of his Elvish tongues. On the other side, the systematic comparison between Tolkien’s writings on his constructed languages and the scholarly sources that constituted his linguistic background may represent a step towards acknowledging Tolkien’s place in the history of linguistic thought.

This paper examines a selection of poems on nature by Margaret Cavendish, an English poet and natural philosopher active in the mid-seventeenth century. Cavendish’s conception of nature was “organicist”, meaning that all creatures – humans, animals and plants alike – share similar abilities in terms of feeling and reasoning. In this essay, Cavendish’s organicism will be discussed as the philosophical framework of her collection Poems, and Fancies (1653), especially those poems in which beasts, plants or nature herself engage in dialogue with human beings about their relationship with the environment. It will be argued that Cavendish’s choice to give voice to nature works as a fictional strategy to help readers imagine an alternative idea of nature, one different to that of nature as resource that was becoming increasingly widespread with the advent of early modern science. In the final section, it will finally be suggested that reading Cavendish’s poetry through the lens of post-humanism can contribute to present-day discussions on the Anthropocene.

Occasional short switches to creaky voice are common in spoken discourse of numerous languages without either the speakers or the recipients being highly aware of them, which is the reason the creaky voice phenomenon is, under the best of conditions, considered by them as a phenomenon of going down to very low or even the lowest part of their vocal range. In this paper, it is proposed that creaky voice when it comes to spoken conversations in German and Croatian serves as a short-term mechanism for a relatively delayed formation of completional prosodic patterns that, until the manifestation of the creaky voice, to that point also comprise, among other features, accents with rising or flat tonal components. Such completional patterns may accompany utterances that immediately precede the decision to allow the interlocutor to take turn, utterances that do not immediately precede it, or utterances that immediately precede a change in the speech act by the same speaker. The creaky voice, however, sometimes occurs in other sequences, i.e., within prosodic patterns without the accents bearing rising or flat components of the tonal movement, which is, however, considered as a result of an unintentional ''slipping'' into creaky voice due to the speaker's to low value of the subglottal pressure at the given moment.

In recent years, the number of minor migrants, both accompanied and unaccompanied, arriving in European countries increased significantly. The impact of newcomers on the school systems of various European countries has highlighted problems in education continuity and in the accomplishment of educational goals. Relying on the preliminary data from the Erasmus+ KA2 project “Continugee” in Italy and Greece, this paper analyses the current policies and practices used in refugee children education. In addition to policy analysis, interviews with families, teachers and professionals operating in migrant shelters and schools were conducted, aimed to address both institutional and relational dimensions of schooling and to point out good practices in educational incorporation of refugee youth. Research shows that – notwithstanding a common concern throughout Europe, national and local regulations, and local practices do affect their access to quality education. Age limits, gender gaps, location of shelters, lack of adequate institutional educational facilities and of professional training make effective educational placement and continuity difficult. Schools have a very different level of effectiveness and European policy innovation is often jeopardized by lack of resources and staff motivation. Recognition of qualifications and skills, a supported participation into mainstream education, and a participatory approach with families and guardians are essential for effective school integration. Keywords: refugee, minors, education, training, policy, European

Communication is one of the most important tools through which man can build his universe, because, through language, man creates and shapes realities. But the reality is constantly changing, which is why the language must respect the same rules and evolve with it. This paper aims to demonstrate the emergence of a new discursive genre, in response to social, cultural and even religious changes in recent decades. The new genre, deeply influenced by the structure of classical religious discourse, distances itself from it both formally and lexically. For this, we have selected and transcribed an excerpt from a public speech of the one we consider the initiator of this new genre, Father Constantin Necula. The paper will mention the reasons that led to the need for a new type of discourse, the specific elements of the genres that underlie it, as well as the elements of innovation.

This paper reads in tandem two major poems: Giacomo Leopardi’s canzone Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche (“To Spring, or on the ancient myths”) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Composed almost exactly one hundred years apart, the two works display some curious affinities in the “rites of Spring” they ironically enact. Eliot never expressed interest in Leopardi, but both poems meditate on classicism, romanticism, and myth, and both are produced in a period of personal and national turmoil for their writers. Read together they might be taken to dramatize the passage between the “modern” work of 1822 and the “modernist” one of 1922, each legible (as Eliot wrote of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough) either “as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation.”

When The Waste Land was published in 1922, David Jones, a 27-year-old Anglo-Welsh painter, was living in the English countryside with a monastic community of artists. A World War I veteran who had been injured in the tragic battle at the Somme, Jones had converted to Catholicism and was developing a modernist aesthetics, producing paintings and engravings where scenes from the gospels (the flagellation, the crucifixion, the empty tomb) were set on the French front, carried out by helpless British infantrymen. The Waste Land was a transformative read for Jones, who thought it embodied the ‘metaphysical disaster’ (Musil 1922) of the war. In later years, Jones began writing about his own wartime experience (Dilworth 1994, 2017): with Eliot’s help and encouragement, he published In Parenthesis (1937), an epic poem (praised by W.H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky, among others) that moved the modernist myth of the waste land from Eliot’s London to the literal wasteland of the trenches. This paper examines Jones’s mythic method, underpinned by his conception of the artist as a ‘maker’ (Jones 1959); it shows how his works blurred the boundaries between artforms by juxtaposing paintings and inscriptions to prose and verse. Jones’s singular perspective as a modernist soldier-bard, drawing from Christian liturgy and Arthurian myth, and the intertextual dialogue with Eliot’s poem, suggest an original reading of the waste land as a ritual space for remembrance, representation, and re-enactment: a useful critical category for a theory of modernism, and a metaphor for the work of art itself.

Our paper aims at illustrating specific ways of mapping surrounding landscape using the Parish Maps. Named after the parish, the smallest unit in a community-based area, they appear as a subjective means to render the outer space. In fact, since they were first experimented by the English Association "Common Ground", they have been used with the specific purpose of revealing the dwellers' point of view on the area they live in: the underlying idea, in fact, is that our landscape is made of different and unique points of view conveyed by those who concur to its making. On the basis of our research experiences over a span of almost 20 years of work using the Parish Maps within the framework of local communities, we believe that these maps can prove to be a useful tool in education contexts too

This paper has the dual purpose of outlining the case history related to paralepsis in literary texts, highlighting the different possibilities of application and the narrative effects that derive in any case towards a transgressive fantastic alteration, and of trying to update the referential system drawn by Genette in 1972. For that, we will draw on some postulates and principles of linguistics and cognitive narratology, applying them to two specific stories by Michele Mari, Josef K. and Lamento del guerriero, when we will show how unexpected informations offered by a particular character (bottom-up vertical paralepsis and internal horizontal paralepsis) produce metaleptic shifts that dis-locate and re-locate the reading around different attractors that transgress the fictional logic (Remorini 2023).

This paper is an introduction to FLE, French as a Foreign Language, as it has been illustrated to secondary school teachers during the TEdu course. In this brief overview, we present the potentialities of this disciplinary and research field, highlighting the articulation between theory and didactic practice, so as to enrich the pedagogical practices of teachers, with a specific focus on the linguistic corpus and the didactic application of large oral corpora of spoken French.

The paper presents the TEdu (Teacher Education Course) proposed by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures of the University of Turin in the academic year 2021/2022. The author, coordinator of the Course, briefly illustrates the idea, the structure and the outcomes of the first edition, dedicated to the topic of inter-personality.

Il numero di lingue ufficiali degli Stati membri esprime solo parzialmente la portata del plurilinguismo esistente nell’Unione Europea. La molteplicità di lingue in uso presso le comunità immigrate strutturatesi nei diversi Paesi, in particolare, costituisce la manifestazione più recente di tale fenomeno, alla quale tuttavia non ha fatto seguito alcuna esplicita revisione dei quadri interpretativi che ne determinano il trattamento. Al contrario, questi paiono ancora protendere – tanto a livello comunitario quanto nel diritto interno dei singoli Stati – verso una considerazione delle lingue quali beni storico-culturali (Savoia 2001; Caretti-Cardone 2014) e strettamente legata al modello di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche (cfr. Extra 2011), categoria dalla quale le lingue parlate dagli immigrati sono generalmente escluse (cfr., tra gli altri, Orioles 2007; Caretti-Cardone 2014), come si nota da ultimo nella risoluzione 2020/2846(RPS). Sorgono così degli interrogativi sull’avanzamento del percorso di definizione dei diritti linguistici (Poggeschi 2010) nell’Unione: c’è spazio per una riflessione euro-unitaria su un’estensione formale del modello di promozione del plurilinguismo alle varietà portate dai gruppi immigrati? Parliamo ad oggi di plurilinguismo delle istituzioni o dei cittadini? Partendo dalla considerazione di questi limiti, il contributo proposto approfondisce la posizione delle lingue di origine degli stranieri residenti nel quadro della promozione euro-unitaria del plurilinguismo, con l’obiettivo di individuare degli spazi di azione possibili per un’estensione delle attuali misure che superi il ricorso al solo modello minoritario e colga invece le peculiarità socio-culturali proprie del fenomeno e le conseguenti implicazioni per il tema dell’integrazione. Keywords: diritti linguistici; plurilinguismo europeo; politica linguistica; minoranze linguistiche; Unione Europea. Integration in diversity: the possible (and necessary) attention to the languages of foreign people resident in Europe in the language policies of the European Union The number of official languages spoken in the States member of European Union accounts only partially of the actual dimension of European plurilingualism. Particularly the number of languages spoken by communities of foreign people permanently resident in the European Countries represents the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon. However, despite its quantitative and qualitative relevance, no modifications of the interpreting frameworks of European plurilingualism have been undertaken. In contrast, policies seem to persist in adopting – both at the national and EU level – a consideration of languages as part of an historical-cultural heritage (see among others Orioles 2007; Caretti-Cardone 2014), and closely related to the model of protection applied to historical minority languages (Extra 2011), a category from which the languages spoken by foreigners are generally excluded (see, among others, Orioles 2007; Caretti-Cardone 2014), as recently shown by the resolution 2020/2846(RPS). Considering this circumstances, two questions about the progression of the debate on linguistic rights (Poggeschi 2010) in the EU arise: Is it possible to individuate the conditions for an European action on the official extension of the plurilingualism framework at the languages stemming from recent migrations? Do we intend an institutional or a social European plurilingualism? This paper aims at investigating the position of the languages of origin of foreign people in the European framework on plurilingualism, with the objective to identify possible actions in order to extend the current policies promoting plurilingualism and overcome the minority model, to include the socio-cultural specificities of the phenomenon and its implications for the integration. Keywords: Linguistic Rights; European Plurilingualism; Language policy; Linguistic minorities; European Union.

This paper investigates the way in which the words used to talk about migration are described by international organisations and public administrations. It proposes a more detailed description of the words that takes into account the morphological characteristics of each word, starting from corpora drawn from the Italian version of the EMN Glossary on Asylum and Migration and the English version of the IOM Glossary on Migration. The study introduces original excerpts of morphologically labelled glossaries comprising of the most frequent words in the migration context. The labelled glossaries present the description of the word units and an explanation of their grammatical behaviours, using tools and techniques from the Lexicon-Grammar theory to account for words’ features usually considered as mere irregularities. The addition of these morphological labels to describe the behaviour of the words in the context of migration would allow them to be used with confidence by speakers, even those whose first language is not that of the country in which they find themselves, thus putting the individual at the core of the issue by giving those most effected the power to voice their opinions.

This paper analyzes the representation of bullying in literature, focusing on the story told in Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906). The analysis focuses on the behavior of the victim and his observer, showing how identification with the fate of the bullied person is the conditio to sharpen the observer's cognitive and critical skills, which are useful in spurring the victim to react proactively and effectively to the bullying suffered. Törleß’s ‘second sight’ – a key principle for understanding the complexity of the real, grounded in the idea of the “vivisection of the soul” – allows for the establishment of correspondences with today’s ‘second-hand’ viewing by the viewer who, through the ‘technological gaze’ made possible by the display, enjoys episodes of school violence. Finally, resorting to the argument set forth by Vattimo and Rovatti in Pensiero debole, the present contribution shows – mutatis mutandis – how today’s phenomenon of cyberbullying is animated by dynamics already explored by literature more than a century ago and yet still capable of providing ethical and empowering responses even to the so-called Millennials and the Generation Z.

The construction of languages has always been related to linguistics. Most of these initiatives address real scientific questions but from a non-academic point of view. The fact that Ferdinand de Saussure's own brother, René de Saussure, wrote a theoretical essay on the construction of the Esperanto word (de Saussure 1914) is an amusing illustration of this. In this paper, we propose a method inspired by experimental archaeology. The experiment consists in trying to obtain an artifact similar to the one observed using this or that construction method. An equivalent approach in linguistics would be the generation of linguistic systems based on explicitly formulated principles. Trying to generate similar systems pushes the linguist to explicitly define the principles that are needed and to explore all their consequences. In this context, we show that the use of notions induced by the observation of natural languages leads to a certain degree of circularity and that it is therefore more interesting to explore a priori principles based on very general assumptions.

Reading Poetry in Invented languages. Prosodic-Syntactic Analysis of Some Cases. In various linguistic domains the prosodic study of poetry has been conducted in different settings with independent methodologies and in recent years revealed the presence of a rich stylistic typology in the spoken version of this literary form. However, the encoding of rhythm and intonation in the reading of poetry in invented languages remains to be explored. This paper aims at analysing the link between prosody and syntax that emerges in the oral rendering of texts with such features. For this research, four texts were selected from the works of four different authors, both Italian and foreign, representative of fictional Italian-like language creation. Two readings of each text were collected, one male and one female, by professional actors. The VIP methodology (Colonna, 2021) was employed to provide a general framework and allowing to account for the relationship between the syntactic level and the constructions uttered reading aloud. Prosodic strategies adopted by different speakers were mainly examined at syntactically critical points. Although the corpus is quite limited, a qualitative analysis at a phonetic level suggested new ways for syntactic understanding and text comprehension and provided a valuable discriminating tool in some cases. Only a quantitative approach extended to a larger corpus – which we aim to develop in the future – would allow a broader picture of this fascinating research topic.

The field of Conlang has evidenced an important growth in the last decades. This has been the product of a wide interest on the use and study of conlangs for artistic purposes. However, one important question is what it is happening with conlang in the academic world. This paper aims to have an overall understanding of the literature on conlang research. With this we aim to give a realistic picture of the field in the current age. We have implemented a computational linguistic approach, combining bibliometrics and network analysis to examine all publications available in the Scopus database. Analysing over 2300 academic publications since 1927 until 2022, we have found that Esperanto is by far the most documented conlang. Three main authors have contributed to this: Garvía R., Fiedler S., and Blanke D. The 1970s and 1980s have been the decades where the foundations of current research have been built. In terms of methodologies, language learning and experimental linguistics are the ones contributing to most as the preferred approaches of study in the field. We present the results and discuss our limitations and future work.

The main question paper discusses is the question as to how we can make sure that a translation into a conlang is acceptable (adequate, correct) despite the fact that there are by definition no native speakers of conlangs. The question is of relevance to practical translation work as well as translation studies even more generally since there are also natural languages for which there are no native speakers to consult on matters of translation correctness or acceptability. A major theme inside this main topic is the question as to who qualifies and on what grounds as an expert who can pass judgements on translation quality in general.

Tolkien was not only a successful author of one of the most complex fantasy lore available in Western literature, but he was also a gifted philologist whose interests ranged from the most disparaged languages, such as Germanic languages, Finnish, Celtic languages and also Latin and Greek. For the creation of his glottopoietic masterpieces – Quenya and Sindarin – he followed an a posteriori process, moving from the templates represented by natural languages, such as Finnish, Germanic languages, Welsh and also Classical languages. Focussing on Quenya, in particular, it is noticeable how this invented language possesses a few relevant features that makes it similar to Latin not only according to the narrowest linguistic perspective but also according to a broader perspective, including the sociolinguistic viewpoint. Some of these features have been summarized and presented in this paper, showing how Tolkien not only reproduced – according to his phonoaesthetic taste – linguistic feature that were closer to Latin than to any other language, but he also reproduced and mimicked the relationships that Latin had with other languages during different periods of its existence.

The Covid-19 pandemic challenged the ability of governments to communicate their decisions. The problems encountered highlighted country-specific and long-unresolved issues. The object of the research is Latvia's leading politicians who have profiles on the most popular social media in Latvia - Facebook. The aim of this paper is to analyze narratives of those members of the Government and the Saeima who held positions related to the areas affected by the pandemic and find out how they communicated about the problems of the European Union (EU) and related topics during the Covid-19 crisis. The research case is relevant because Latvians have one of the lowest trust rates in the national parties, the parliament and the government. Also, in the first half of 2021, Latvia faced one of the lowest vaccination rate in the EU. That has influenced the communication of politicians, as decision-making can happen taking into account the mood and perceptions of the population. The core values of the EU can be identified in the communication of Latvian politicians, permeating a wide range of issues, highlighting the importance of unity and mutual cooperation in the implementation of successful policies. Politicians don’t try to broaden the scope of values and goals, but it is possible to observe different interpretations of the breadth of values, adapting it to the position and political goal. Politicians also refer to the EU to cover own faults. The results are useful for comparing examples of political communication practices during Covid-19 crisis and the reference to European values ​​in National political discourses. Keywords: Political communication, Narratives, Covid-19 pandemic, European Union, Latvia

The reflections brought about in the present paper are developed along a renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and the human sciences, in particular with semiotics understood as the science of signification, a science, according to the definition that Saussure gave in the early twentieth century, "that studies the life of signs within the framework of social life." The specific object of our reflection is understanding whether and how the mentalization abilities of modern humans have changed along with modern digital media. If what MacIver observed about "anomie" is true, namely, that anomic man "lives on the fragile thread of immediate sensations that have no past as well as no future," the specific structure of social media seems to determine psychosocial processes characterized by the flattening of an existential perspective dimension. Social media, in fact, is marked by a linear dimension, referred to by linguists as syntagmatic, and an extreme redundancy of the other fundamental dimension of language, namely the paradigmatic one. This linguistic and, in our opinion, also deeply psychological imbalance toward a horizontal superficiality "without past and without future" actually configures, in clinical experience, a contiguous-autistic dimension. Psychotherapeutic work then aims more than ever at recovering the capacity for a processual journey, session after session, in order to rebuild a vital "psycho-semio-narrative" capacity. Remembering in order to invent, then, and a "memory of the future" such that the relationship between narrative and Origins is not so much and not only the "narrative of origins," but storytelling as a deeply mental and dreamlike tool to originate a future never before imagined.

This proposal intends to connect the Studies in Modernisms with the research strand of the creation myths and the narrations of origins (Von Franz). The paper aims to investigate the biblical-sapiential presence, specifically of the book of Qohelet, in a central text of the Euro-American modernism: T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). Scope of the essay is to analyze, through the lens of the Narrations of Origins in World Cultures and the Arts, the first steps of a modernist Euro-American formal experimentation at the beginnings of the Twentieth century.

This paper investigates anthropogenesis, which is the process of becoming human, from an interdisciplinary perspective, namely among science, theatre, and visual arts. The motif of animals locked in a cage – especially apes, but not only – is recurrent when talking about humans and their origin as cultural beings. Relying on some monkey portraits made by Gabriel von Max, in which the animals appear deprived of their freedom, the focus is on Kafka’s short story Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy, 1917) and on Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung (Auto da Fé, 1935), mainly on a chapter entitled “Ein Irrenhaus” (A Madhouse). In both texts we are confronted with an ongoing metamorphosis, with hybrid figures in which the boundaries between man and ape are blurred. Although in one case the ape becomes a man and in the other the man becomes an ape, so that both metamorphoses proceed in opposite directions, the ultimate goal is freedom. However, this freedom reveals all its problematic nature since escape from the cage does not always mean liberation. The two texts, which are presented as a reinterpretation of the myth of the origin of culture between nostalgia for a distant past and critique of human progress, are essential reflections on the power dynamics at the basis of civilization.

This paper traces the main transformations in the formation of Latvian literary culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking at these processes from a comparative perspective, we detect four major turning points that are of special interest here. First, we observe how religious literature turns secular during the second half of the eighteenth century in the context of the Popular Enlightenment, and what this change means for the perception of written texts. Secondly, we scrutinize the process in which former readers among ethnic Latvians become interested in writing. Thirdly, we put the dawn of romantic nationalism in Latvian literary contexts into comparative perspective. Finally, we argue that the representation of urban life at the end of the nineteenth century testifies to the swift rise of Latvian literature overcoming the constraints of belated modernity and marking participation in European literary trends.

After more than 20 years of trade integration, Mexico and the European Union (EU) started renegotiating the accord in 2016 and concluded in 2020. The treaty signed in 2000 corresponds to a series of deep integration agreements that seek to go further than the liberalization of goods, services, and investments and aspire to be more of an understanding of cooperation in several policy areas. Mexico joined the agreement to achieve more diversified exports to offset Mexico's dependence on the US market and to include other spheres besides trade. The EU found in Mexico a trade partner with a strategic geographical location to access the US and Canadian markets. Likewise, the EU would benefit from the liberalized Mexican financial market with potential profits in the financial and telecommunication sectors. This work reviews the agreement in 2020 from the deep integration agreement framework lens. We examine to what extent these provisions provide the conditions for a deep integration that benefits both regions. We also analyze whether the renegotiation of 2020 can be seen as an attempt to further this cooperation process and the economic implications for Mexico. We argue in this paper that the former Free Trade Agreement between the European Union and Mexico (FTA-EU-MX) consolidated a trade pattern that existed before the agreement with EU multinationals concentrated in critical industrial sectors, without significant trade creation for medium and small businesses. This result confirms that there have been advances in shallow integration but no substantial changes in cooperation or deep integration. After analyzing the 2020 renegotiation text, we conclude that Mexico could achieve significant gains in areas of cooperation as the 2020 text has more enforceable policies, which was not the case with the 2000 treaty. Keywords: deep integration, Mexico, European Union, international cooperation JEL: F10, F15, F50

This paper explores the various aspects of plurilingual language policies at the University of Turin. An ethnographic document analysis substantiated with a student survey indicate that plurilingual manifestations serve three main themes: (1) a plurilingual curriculum with much emphasis on foreign language competencies across disciplines, (2) plurilingual policies for internationalisation purposes fostering quality education, mobility, employability and networking, and (3) a plurilingual external communication strategy aiming at promoting the university’s visibility for a worldwide academic audience. The policies adopted by the university, however, need to be more transparent and further consolidated so that the impact on the student community can be more significant and tangible.

The comma splice according to Italian speakers. The comma splice (i.e. the use of a comma to join two independent clauses) is known to be a widespread non-standard linguistic phenomenon in Italian Computer-Mediated Communication. This paper aims to investigate how this particular use of commas is actually judged by Italian speakers. In order to do so, an online survey containing 30 short texts was distributed. The results interestingly show that Italian speakers tend to consider the comma splice as a standard use of punctuation, even in case of very marked commas (e.g. the use of a comma to join two sentences with different illocutions). The comma splice being perceived as totally acceptable is an important clue of its likely diffusion in more traditional Italian texts in the next future.

The use of English to teach academic subjects at university level has been on the increase in the past years, attracting considerable research attention. Among the most pressing issues is that of the language competences required to teach and learn through English. Accordingly, EMI studies have investigated, among other topics, the use of language in the classroom, focusing on the features of lecturers’ spoken production in English. Although the use of English is assumed in EMI, insights into classroom practices indicate that lecturers and students engage in translanguaging between English and other languages. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether lecturers pursue a language policy in class, why they confine themselves to English and when they exploit their multilingual resources, allowing or even prompting students to do the same. Drawing data from interviews with thirty EMI lecturers from five European countries (Croatia, Denmark, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands), the lecturers’ implicit or explicit language policies will be investigated, inquiring into the motives for the adoption of an English-only approach or the flexible use of other languages. Subsequently, classroom discourse practices will be examined focusing on translanguaging in order to verify whether reported language policies and practices correspond to observable behaviour. The data for the study of language use in class is taken from the TAEC Corpus, consisting of thirty transcribed EMI lectures collected within the five countries under study. We will discuss the complexity of the rationale behind English-only language choices and pluralistic language use, arguing that multilingual-oriented EMI policies should not be normed top-down but emerge from communication needs in the classroom.

Developing Pragmatic Intercommunication Strategies through Multilingual Online Interaction. In order to show how the UNITA context allows students to move on from intercomprehension to intercommunication in romance languages, this paper analyzes the use of pragmatic oral interaction strategies in intercomprehension by students in the context of a plurilingual and telecollaborative scenario.

If our knowledge of Epicurean philosophy depended exclusively upon the information conveyed by their adversaries, we would be practically unaware of the political component of the Epicurean study of nature (φυσιολογία), and of the political considerations that grounded the Epicurean way of life. This paper shows how Cicero omits some elements of Epicureanism that are crucial to understanding how political reflection was integrated into Epicurean philosophy. We argue that Cicero consciously omits important details of Epicurean arguments regarding ethics and politics and includes some silences that can be described as «clamorous». By bypassing the crucial interconnection between political theory and the Epicurean study of nature, Cicero includes passing reference to Epicurean contractualism and he does not set out the Epicurean theoretical framework in which it was originally inscribed.

The paper takes its title from a lecture given by T.S. Eliot in 1950, in which he pointed out the lessons Dante had taught him. In fact Dante remains Eliot’s chief model and point of reference throughout his work. His first collections present characters and encounters reminiscent of Dante’s dialogues with the damned and purging souls in the afterlife. Eliot saw in Dante “the great master of the disgusting”, authorizing his own descent into the sordid world of the Sweeney poems of 1920. But Dante is also a guide to an earthly paradise, to bliss and acquiescence in God’s will – states of mind approached in the poems written after Eliot’s conversion, which are meditative soliloquies rather than confrontations with others. In Dante Eliot detected, surprisingly, “the Catholic philosophy of disillusion”, that is, his own somber view of fallen humanity. This position is shared to some extent by Robert Frost (whose characters are often in pain, and whose worldview is dark, if ironic). Other modernists, like Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, are more optimistic about the pursuit of worldly happiness, and so come well within Protestant tradition. Dante is barely alluded to by Stevens, who attempted to write as if there were no precedent, while the entire project of Pound’s Cantos is Dantean, even in the violence of their denunciations and maddening topicality, as well as in their recurrent revelations of a proximate paradise.

The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous and timeless narrative poems, being still translated into several languages and inspiring movie adaptations (from Pasolini to Greenaway), pop and rock music, advertisement videogames and graphic novels.The transformations the text has gone through throughout the years reveal several different interpretations of Dante’s work and of its meaning. This essay aims at tracing a history of Dante-based graphic novels in the Anglo-American tradition. Particular attention is devoted to Birk and Sanders’ Dante’s Inferno (2004) and to Seymour Chwast’s graphic novel, Dante’s Divine Comedy (2010), which is the only ‘translation’ into a poster design style. This paper also examines how the Divine Comedy changes migrating from its original context to the contexts that characterized the different adaptations and remediations, and from its original poem form to new genres. It argues that the graphic novel is the genre better able to give to a contemporary reader a new Dante’s Divine Comedy keeping intact the delicate balance between words and imagines (the long history of the Divine Comedy’s illustration testifies it: from Botticelli to Joshua Reynolds, from Gustave Doré, to William Blake until Guttuso, see Battaglia Ricci 2018). Between losses and compensations, the graphic novel establishes a dialogue with its reader on several levels, depending on the expertise of source work and stimulating the reading (or the re-reading) of the classic; in this way they could be considered a strategy of survival of the classic.

Charles Wright is one of the contemporary American poets who have most profoundly absorbed Dante’s Commedia into their work. This paper places Wright’s interest in Dante in context, focusing on Purgatorio as the canticle he relates to most in his poetry, and the book closest to his own poetics. Examples taken from various texts support this reading of Wright’s relationship with the medieval Florentine poet.

My paper focuses on Valentine Giamatti’s collection of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy editions at Mount Holyoke College. The son of Italian immigrants, Giamatti (1911-1982) followed a path that was unusual in the Italian-American community at that time, graduating both from Yale (B.A.) and Harvard (Ph.D.). He joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke in 1940, at a very delicate moment in the USA-Italian political relations. Giamatti’s collection of Dante editions originated from a wedding gift. Over the years it grew to include over two hundred volumes in many languages. It contains rare editions (including the first Florentine edition of the Commedia with drawings after Botticelli, and the first edition with the adjective ‘Divina’ in print) and curious ones (such as L’Inferno di Topolino). Seven centuries after Dante’s death, the Giamatti collection is the perfect gateway for a reflection on his collecting style and on the immense relevance of Dante’s poem in American culture.

Among the many re-uses of Dante’s Comedy in contemporary artistic expressions (movies, music, novels, poetry) the essay presents John Kinsella’s trilogy, Divine Comedy. Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008), On the Outskirts (2017), and Musical Dante (2021). Here Dante’s poem inspires an ecological poetry in defense of the multiplicity of life on our planet. The paper discusses why Dante inspires such a poetic discourse on one of the most topical and urgent problems. Presenting the similarities and differences between Dante’s and Kinsella’s poetry, evident in the structures and in the concept of Nature, it eventually indicates their profound affinity in the ethical sphere and regarding the focus on small territories as case studies for the entire world.

Questo contributo propone una riflessione intorno agli accordi di Saretto redatti e firmati nel maggio 1944 da resistenti italiani e maquisards francesi. Tra le montagne, alla frontiera franco-italiana, sono due filoni politico-intellettuali affini d’ispirazione socialista, laica e democratica che, in piena Seconda Guerra mondiale, si ritrovano per porre le basi di una comune ricostruzione europea in nome di valori condivisi e ancora attuali quali le libertà democratiche e la giustizia sociale. La prima parte del saggio definisce anzitutto il contesto internazionale dei primi anni Quaranta, con riferimento particolare alla Francia e all’Italia, soffermandosi sulla concezione ideale, e internazionale, della battaglia antifascista. L’interesse si sposta poi sulle correnti europeiste in seno alla Resistenza francese e italiana (soprattutto piemontese), mettendo in risalto personaggi di primo piano come Henri Frenay, Silvio Trentin, Albert Camus. La seconda parte si concentra, invece, sui protagonisti degli incontri franco-italiani, tra cui Detto Dalmastro, Dante Livio Bianco e Duccio Galmimberti per la Resistenza italiana e Jacques Lécuyer, Jean Lippmannn e Max Juvénal per quella francese. Dopo aver esposto i contenuti elaborati a Saretto, l’articolo s’interroga su alcune ragioni che ne hanno impedito la realizzazione concreta. Lo scopo è di contribuire a una storia transnazionale della Resistenza attraverso l’analisi di un evento tuttora poco studiato. Nonostante il processo di costruzione europea cominci nel secondo dopoguerra muovendo da ispirazioni funzionaliste, simili documenti storici sono di fondamentale importanza per comprendere la pluralità del pensiero europeista. Keywords Accordi di Saretto – Europeismo – Diplomazia partigiana – Resistenza francese e italiana – Seconda Guerra mondiale Abstract This paper proposes a study of the Saretto agreements drafted and signed in May 1944 by Italian resistance fighters and French maquisards. In the mountains, on the French-Italian border, there are two similar political-intellectual strands of socialist, secular and democratic inspiration which, in the middle of the Second World War, came together to lay the foundations for a common European reconstruction in the name of shared and still current values such as democratic freedoms and social justice. The first part of the essay primarily defines the international context of the early 1940s, with particular reference to France and Italy, dwelling on the ideal, and international, conception of the anti-fascist battle. The interest then turns to the Europeanist currents within the French and Italian Resistance (especially Piedmontese), highlighting leading figures such as Henri Frenay, Silvio Trentin, Albert Camus. The second part focuses, instead, on the protagonists of the Franco-Italian meetings, including Detto Dalmastro, Dante Livio Bianco and Duccio Galmimberti for the Italian Resistance and Jacques Lécuyer, Jean Lippmannn and Max Juvénal for the French one. After having exposed the contents elaborated in Saretto, the article questions some of the reasons that prevented its concrete realization. The aim is to contribute to a transnational history of the Resistance through the analysis of an event that is still little studied. Although the process of European construction began after the Second World War, moving from functionalist inspirations, such historical documents are of fundamental importance to understand the plurality of Europeanist thought. Keywords Saretto Agreements - Europeism - Partisan Diplomacy - French and Italian Resistance - Second World War

La prospettiva adottata in questo articolo è quella antropologica e degli studi di genere, che permettono di intersecare genere e religioni in modo inedito, nel lungo cammino per il riconoscimento della diversità, delle differenze e dei diritti civili. Le ricerche su genere e sessualità nelle scienze umane e sociali (cosiddetti women’s and gender studies) hanno ormai una storia più che trentennale che ha consentito un dialogo e un confronto interdisciplinare. L’intersezionalità è un riferimento metodologico in molta ricerca sociale come anche il posizionamento che sottolinea la non neutralità dell’osservazione partecipante e l’attenzione alle gerarchie di potere che si declinano in diversi ambiti. Dunque, religione e politica non sono praticate in un vacuum ma sono influenzate dalla cultura e dal gender, inteso come costrutto storico, sociale e culturale. Tutto questo si articola diversamente a seconda delle diverse religioni, e in particolare nell’islam, nei Paesi di origine, nei Paesi di insediamento delle collettività migranti, nei Paesi membri dell’Unione europea e negli eventuali spostamenti o scambi culturali. Gender and religions, the long run of diversity and the politics of recognition This paper adopts an anthropological perspective on gender studies, allowing to intertwine gender and religion in an original way, in the long run towards the recognition of diversity, of differences and of civil rights. Research in gender and sexuality in the human and social sciences (so-called women’s and gender studies) have had a long history in the past thirty years that has nurtured an interdisciplinary dialogue and discussion. Intersectionality is a methodological tool in much social research as well as positionality that addresses the issue of non-neutrality of participant observation. Therefore, religion and politics are not practiced in a “vacuum” but they are influenced by gender which is a historical, social and cultural construct. All that is differently articulated, according to different religious context, particularly in Islam, both in the countries of origin and in the countries of settlement where migrant collectivities live, either in the member states of the European Union or in other transitions and cultural exchanges. Keywords: gender, diversity, religion, history, anthropology, politics of recognition