Iconicity in Rap Music The challenge of an anti-language

Starting from the assumption that iconicity, as a means of narration, is prevalent in circumstances in which a new language is invented, the paper investigates the anti-language (Halliday, 1978) of rap music, considered as a performed narrative genre belonging to the long-standing African American oral tradition. As they vividly describe the social conditions and the plight of urban young blacks, most rap songs, in fact, offer powerful narratives of inner-city life, which are to be taken into consideration in a sociolinguistic perspective, both in their narrative structure and in the language used. The analysis, which is pragmatic, is based on a corpus of one hundred songs, collected from 1979 (the year of the first rap record release) up to nowadays. The iconic use of idiophones, alphabetic letters, onomatopoeia, rhyme, metonymy, eye dialect and word-formation processes will be discussed, in an attempt to investigate the extent to which iconicity is a driving force towards lexicalization, but also to what extent the iconic one-to-one principle is violated by individual reinterpretations due to the interaction between author and listener

Licence to Adapt: the Resilience of the 007 Narration in Casino Royale

Attolino, Paola. “Licence to Adapt: the Resilience of the 007 Narration in Casino Royale.” «Testi e linguaggi» 7(2013):139-148. [Studi monografici. Letteratura in performance, a cura di A. D’Amelia e A. Piazza

Recensioni e letture

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics(Nadia Manzo) – Beïda Chikhi, Assia Djébar: histoires et fantaisies (Mena Marotta) – Juan Goytisolo, Contra las sagradas formas (Paola Chiara Santoro) – Lisa Hopkins, Screen Adaptations. Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The relationship between Text and Film (Maria Izzo) – Paul Skandera (ed.), Phraseology and Culture in English (Paola Attolino) – Yoko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Daniela Allocca)Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics(Nadia Manzo) – Beïda Chikhi, Assia Djébar: histoires et fantaisies (Mena Marotta) – Juan Goytisolo, Contra las sagradas formas (Paola Chiara Santoro) – Lisa Hopkins, Screen Adaptations. Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The relationship between Text and Film (Maria Izzo) – Paul Skandera (ed.), Phraseology and Culture in English (Paola Attolino) – Yoko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Daniela Allocca

Recensioni e letture

David Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Sabrina Petrillo) – Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature (Clara Antonucci) – Russell Jackson, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Maria Izzo) – Miguel León Portilla, Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares(Eliana Guagliano) – Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere. Israel-Palestine since 2003 (Paola Attolino) – Vincent Sherry, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Marcella Soldaini) – Marko Juvan, Jelka Kernev Sˇ trajn (eds.), Teoretsko-Literarni Hibridi: o Dialogu Literature in Teorije / Hibridizing Theory and Literature: on the Dialogue Between Theory and Literature (Flora de Giovanni) – La fiaba e la letteratura per l’infanzia. Due studi a confronto: Laura Tosi, La fiaba letteraria inglese. Metamorfosi di un genere; Francesca Orestano (a cura di), Tempi moderni nella Children’s Literature. Storie, personaggi, strumenti critici (Elena Paruolo)David Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Sabrina Petrillo) – Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature (Clara Antonucci) – Russell Jackson, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Maria Izzo) – Miguel León Portilla, Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares(Eliana Guagliano) – Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere. Israel-Palestine since 2003 (Paola Attolino) – Vincent Sherry, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Marcella Soldaini) – Marko Juvan, Jelka Kernev Sˇ trajn (eds.), Teoretsko-Literarni Hibridi: o Dialogu Literature in Teorije / Hibridizing Theory and Literature: on the Dialogue Between Theory and Literature (Flora de Giovanni) – La fiaba e la letteratura per l’infanzia. Due studi a confronto: Laura Tosi, La fiaba letteraria inglese. Metamorfosi di un genere; Francesca Orestano (a cura di), Tempi moderni nella Children’s Literature. Storie, personaggi, strumenti critici (Elena Paruolo

THE TELL TALE HEART… OF MINE: POE TOLD BY STEWART COPELAND

Stewart Copeland is known all over the world as the co-funder and drummer for The Police, one of the most successful and innovative bands in rock history. By the time The Police disbanded, in 1983, Stewart Copeland was already established as a composer of film scores, and in the following years, he has become an accomplished and prolific composer of film scores, operas, and ballets. The present paper offers an analysis of The Tell-Tale Heart, one of Edgar Allan Poe’s story adapted by Copeland into an opera. Focusing on the inter-semiotic transformation occurring between prose and opera, which originates a completely new work of art in the target genre, Copeland’s work has to be viewed as a ‘transmutation’ (following the term suggested by Umberto Eco in 2003) rather than an ‘adaptation’, which overshadows critical discussions of adaptation generally dealing with the idea of the original versus the reproduction and often permeated by the problem of fidelity