Multimodal Misrepresentations of Southtern Italy overseas

In the same years as the McDonaldization/Starbuckization of society, aspects of Mediterranean cultures have both survived and flourished beyond their natural boundaries – mostly through the medium of communication in English – though frequently acquiring new connotations/meanings which (too) often result in a dynamic interplay of symbols and clichés. The re-contextualization of the ‘Italian’ social/ethnic group in the Anglophone semiosphere is in fact still carried out through multimodal strategies which frequently produce comic, grotesque, paradoxical and even derogatory effects. Within the realms of linguistic and cultural studies, this class focuses on the various (mis)representations, expressions, practices, as well as artefacts and cultural spaces that constitute the vibrant socio semiotic landscape of Italianness at the intersection of the Italian and North American lingua-cultural frameworks. More specifically, from a cross-cultural perspective, the complex issues of Italian ethnic identities are investigated as they are conveyed mainly via advertising, films, myths and festivals, websites and new technologies, culture-bound terms, migrating words and food. Italianness will be interpreted across a range of semantic, syntactic and discursive and visual devices utilized to depict Italy as the possible unifying referent of diverse physical and anthropic environments and as a metonymic embodiment of various social and lingua-cultural paradigm shifts.