Thèse--Uppsala. / "Bibliographie": p. [251]-255.

Thesis. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Copenhagen. / No more published? "Bogliste": p. [199]-201; "Ordbøger": p. [202].

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1911. / Also published in same series without thesis note. Bibliography: p. 162-163.

Thesis--Leipzig. / Cover title. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Published also as Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. / Bibliography: 4th-5th prelim. leaf.

The thesis investigates the sociological, cultural and ideological factors that affect the production and marketing of two major translations published in Fascist Italy and targeting both adult and young readers. The dissertation focuses upon a selected corpus of translations of the American novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Little Women (1868), which were repeatedly translated between the 1920s and 1940s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses fields such as the history of publishing, the sociology of translation, children’s literature, studies on the role and functions of the Paratext and scholarship on Fascism and its cultural policy, this study aims to offer a detailed examination of the Italian publishing market during the Ventennio. It probes the contexts informing the publishing history of these translations, their readerships, and interrelations with the growing importance of cinema, as well as questions related to the various retranslations produced. Furthermore, given the central role of publishing in the shaping of political consent and the contradictory attitude of the regime towards translations, this thesis explores ideological influences affecting selected translations of these novels that centre on issues of particular resonance for the regime, namely, race and gender. The dissertation is divided in two parallel sections, each one divided into three chapters. The opening chapters in each part examine the publishing history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Women respectively, with attention to the USA, the UK, and France and a primary focus upon Italy, above all Fascist Italy. The following chapters in each section investigate the role that the visual representations of these two books played in conveying racial and gender aspects and in contributing to the construction of their meaning by the readers. Finally, the closing chapters of each section are devoted to a translation analysis of selected passages in order to survey translational behaviours used to depict feminine and racial features, given that these were known to be especially problematic during the Ventennio. This survey aims to pinpoint norms informing translations targeting both young people and adults.

In this thesis, I propose a theoretical framework to understand the process of secularization produced by the revolutions of language and life. Thanks to the linguistic turn it has discovered that knowledge is kept within language. As Agamben explains, the Copernican revolution of language has made us “the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language. For the first time, what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names for language. This is why for us, any philosophy, any religion, or any knowledge that has not become conscious of this turn belongs irrevocably to the past”(Agamben, 2005a: 45). Thanks to the vitalist turn, modern thought has found out that human beings are natural beings and, in spite of the peculiarity of their characteristics, their origin is the result of the natural process of evolution. I will maintain that this process of secularization leads to a new theological way of thinking definable as secularized theology. The peculiarity of secularized theology lies in the fact that it finds its ownmost reason of existence in the demonstration of the “death of God” but, the absence of revelation becomes the true revelation. The absence of the theological God reveals a secularized form of God – the God of those who believe of being without God. The name of this new divinity comes from Nietzsche who wrote that he would believe only in a God able to dance: The Dancing God. In La vita. Un’invezione recente, the Italian philosopher Davide Tarizzo argues that before modernity human beings did not exist “in the sense that the question of the humanity of man was not being asked, nor was there any ‘analysis of finitude’ in which ‘man’s being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him”(Tarizzo, 2011: 53). Modernity becomes the process of secularization whereby the human being no longer measures himself against God, but becomes the measure of himself. The human being himself is the subject and the object of his own inquiry. The linguistic and the vitalist turns are, first and foremost, a reaction to theology. If in theology human being measures himself with respect to God, the disappearance of God makes human being size of himself. What distinguishes and opposes them is the definition of the human being, the unit of measure used to establish the humanity of man. On the one hand, the essence of the human being becomes language, on the other, the nature of the human being starts being biological life. Modernity is the epoch of the Dancing God and language and life are the two opposing doctrines fighting for the orthodoxy. The ultimate reason for this conflict is the definition of the essence or nature of the human being. In order to let emerge the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turns, I will address the question of the philosophy of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the discipline aimed at envisioning a politics able to give voice to the nature of the human being. Before proposing a biopolitical account it is therefore necessary to answer the philosophical question concerning the definition of the human being. I will claim that the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turn in defining what it means to be human is the source of modern monotheism. Thinking beyond secularized theology ultimately means to challenge the Copernican revolution of language and the Darwinian revolution of life in order to envision a new ontology grounded on a different understating of the human being. In the present work – which represents the pars dentures of this theoretical project – I will demonstrate that the revolution of language and life has to be understood as a form of revelation, more precisely, as the revelation of the lack of revelation. I will enquiry the linguistic and vitalist approach to the philosophy of biopolitics through the analysis of the work of three contemporary Italian philosophers: Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Davide Tarizzo. The decision to focus on Italian biopolitical theory is determined by the conviction that this philosophical approach offers one of the clearest and best-articulated insights into the fracture between life and language.

This variationist sociolinguistic study investigates language change in the Francoprovençal speaking communities of les monts du Lyonnais in France, and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. In Chapter 1 we give a brief overview of Francoprovençal, and outline the parameters of the study. Chapter 2 presents an overview of where Francoprovençal has come from and why it is so controversial. Beginning with its origins, we give a brief history of dialectalisation for our fieldwork areas, before discussing Francoprovençal as an exceptional case in the Romance linguistic literature. Case studies on language maintenance and shift are presented in Chapter 3, where we contextualise our study on Francoprovençal and the emergence of the 'Arpitan' revitalisation movement. We argue that Francoprovencal does not quite fit the mould of other multidialectal contexts such as Breton or Corsican. Chapter 4 outlines the methods employed in undertaking the empirical and ethnographic fieldwork for the study. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 we examine each of the linguistic variables in the study in relation to a number of extra-linguistic factors. Our findings indicate that, while older traditional speakers produce localised dialectal variants in a more monitored speech style, there is variation. Conversely, the new speakers not only show substantial linguistic divergence from other speakers in the sample, but also from each other. We present evidence to suggest that the pan-regional norm is having some impact on language use. In Chapter 8 we focus specifically on the Arpitan movement and its effects, asking in what ways a commitment to the revitalisation cause is driving change for some participants in the study. A novel Arpitan Engagement Index is employed to assess the extent to which speakers are connected with the movement and how this correlates with language use: we focus on the social significance of a series of 'new' Arpitan forms. We terminate with our conclusions in Chapter 9, where we advance a number of hypotheses in relation to language change in the communities under investigation. In particular, we suggest that convergence is taking place in the direction of both national and regional norms. Lastly, we suggest avenues for future research trajectories.

The present study was carried out to investigate the possible effects of two types of form-focused instruction (henceforth FFI) on the acquisition of a specific feature of the Italian verbal morphology system: namely the future tense, which has hitherto never been researched within this framework. Processing instruction was compared to a more traditional type of grammar instruction output-based. The impact of these two types of FFI was investigated on a well documented strategy (Musumeci 1989) used by second language (henceforth L2) learners when interpreting tenses. This strategy consists in giving precedence to lexical items (in this case temporal adverbs, i.e. oggi, domani) over morphological markers during learner's interpretation of tenses. In order to carry out this investigation, first year students (39 subjects) in their second semester, learning Italian at the University of Greenwich were randomly assigned to three groups. One group received processing instruction, which involved grammar explanation and comprehension practice directed at altering the way second language learners process input and make correct meaning-form connections; the other group received output-based type of instruction which consisted in an explanation of grammar rules followed by written and oral practice which was directed at altering the way L2 learners produce the target language; the third group was used as a control group and received no instruction. The groups were exposed to two consecutive days of instructional treatment and pre-tests and post-tests were carried out. The tests consisted of an aural interpretation task, a written completion text and an oral limited response production task. A delayed post-test was also administered to assess the possible effects of instruction after three weeks. Based on previous research carried out in a feature of Spanish (Cadierno 1993) verbal morphology, it was hypothesised that processing instruction would have positive effects on the accuracy with which subjects interpreted sentences in Italian (future tense vs present tense) in which temporal reference is only expressed by verb morphology. It was also hypothesized that the effects of processing instruction would be visible on the production of both the written and the oral task. A further hypothesis was that the effects of instruction would/hold over a post-test session three weeks later. Overall the statistical analyses carried out on the data supported the three hypotheses of this study. The results obtained in this research provide some evidence that processing instruction has positive effects on the acquisition of Italian verbal morphology, these effects being greater on the developing system of beginners, L2 learners, than output-based instruction. However the output-based group performed better than the control group in the interpretation task. This is an interesting finding as it was not hypothesised, but is likely to have significant implications for further research within this framework. The present study also showed that processing instruction was successful in altering the way in which learners processed the input and its effects had also an impact on the way learners produced future tense at sentence level in both a written and an oral production task. Finally, these effects were proved durable over a three week period. The results obtained in the present study have implications at two levels. At the theoretical level this study provides further support for the role that input processing plays in SLA. At the pedagogical level it demonstrates the effectiveness of processing instruction not only on an interpretation task but also on a written and oral production task. This is further evidence of the suitability of this pedagogical approach to encourage linguistic competence among L2 learners.