Esterino Adami

Università degli Studi di Torino, StudiUm, Department of Humanities, Faculty Member

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I am an associate professor of English, at the University of Turin, and I teach and research in the following areas: stylistics, narratology, sociolinguistics, varieties of English, postcolonial discourse, and Indian English literature and culture.

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Papers by Esterino Adami

Indefinite identity: the textual construction of ambiguitey in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

What’s in a Curry? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Indian Food Discourse

Textus, 2019

A Passage to Gibraltar: Alterity and Representation in M. G. Sanchez

Review of Emilia Di Martino, Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction: Analyzing Geordie Stylizations

Bhagat, Chetan (2015). <em>Making India Awesome</em>. New Delhi: Rupa, pp. 177

˜Il œTolomeo, 2016

Sanchez, M.G. (2015). <em>Solitude House</em>. Huntingdon: Rock Scorpion Books, pp. 292

˜Il œTolomeo, 2015

Indian English across Texts and Discourses

Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts

More than Language and Literature: Postcolonial Connections and Linguistic Paradigms in Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s Indian English Fiction

Identity, language and place: reassessing macabre and funeral places as sites of cultural promotion from dark tourism to the interdisciplinary project 'tutTO sotTO

This article aims to turn a critical lens on the connection between identity, language and place ... more This article aims to turn a critical lens on the connection between identity, language and place by looking at the idea of dark tourism and dark sites, in particular cemeteries, whose wealth of material and immaterial culture suggests a reflection on memory, and in parallel fuels a social and economic promotion of local communities. Such an argument stems from an interdisciplinary two-year research project entitled 'tutTO sotTO', which aimed to unveil some apparently bizarre aspects of Turin's heritage to encourage a rethinking of the overlapping between identity, territory and memory. Drawing from different dis- ciplines such as tourism, cultural studies and discourse analysis, the paper examines the emergence of dark tourism, identifying its theoretical context, linguistic strategies and inner tensions, and then focuses on the specific case of Turin's Monumental Cemetery, discussing some of its complex narratives, from the tombs of WWI English soldiers, the mausole...

Emilia Di Martino, Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction: Analyzing Geordie Stylizations (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 159 pp., ISBN: 978-0-367-22680-0

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In Other Pictures : Translating Cultures, Translating Comics in Kari

In Other Pictures : Translating Cultures, Translating Comics in Kari, 2016

(Article included in O. Palusci and K. Russo, eds, 2016, Translating East and West, Trento: Tangr... more

XXVIII AIA Conference The railway as a creative linguistic domain in Indian travel writing

In India, the railways constitute a fundamental infrastructure and a significant social context a... more In India, the railways constitute a fundamental infrastructure and a significant social context as well (Aguiar 2011). Here, the notion of railway discourse seems to follow a double orientation in balance between conventionality and creativity: on the one hand, it represents a particular type of specialised and technical field, with its restricted vocabulary, but on the other, it also displays a considerable level of linguistic creativity, which reveals the diatopic nature of Indian English (Carter 2004, Jayaraman 2011, Jones 2012, Adami 2013). This particular variety of English, in fact, appears to elaborate the specific domain of railway register by displaying innovative, non-standard lexical items and expressions such as 'bogie', 'retiring room' and 'rail rooko' (Talaat 1993, Nihalani et al. 2000, Sailaja 2009), which often exemplify either linguistic archaisms or hybrid expressions with borrowings from Hindi (or other vernacular languages). In this paper, I set out to investigate the linguistic, textual and metaphoric representations of railway discourse by focusing on Around India in 80 Trains (2012), a recent non-fictional text, in which Monisha Rajesh, a British journalist of Asian descent, documents her experience of travelling by train throughout India. Not only does this travelogue portray the complex world of the railways and mobility, but it also argues the key cultural role played by this technology and to achieve such purpose it triggers rhetorical strategies, in particular by foregrounding the railway domain as a sort of megametaphor, underpinning the entire account. The cognitive metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY may here be resourcefully recast as LIFE IS A RAILWAY NETWORK, in which the TRAIN source component is employed to map and encode meanings, symbols and references. If the official motto of Indian Railways, probably the largest train company in the world, reads 'Lifeline of the Nation', Rajesh adopts and adapts it within an 'embodied' perspective so that the rail system is viewed as the "bloodstream that keeps India's heart beating" (2012: 181), a figurative structure that carries sociocultural and ideological values. However, the author's project ties up with a personal quest and, in building a narrative approach to multicultural India, it offers insights into the exploration of identity. Methodologically, the investigation will be carried out through an interdisciplinary approach that benefits from the contributions of various areas such as stylistics, metaphor studies, postcolonial discourse and cultural studies (e.g. Wales 1995, Gavins 2007, Sorlin 2013), and will analyse a selection of passages to uncover the innovative quality of the text.

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A few notes on PASS, a European project for language education

Contemporary Sites of Chaos in the Literatures and Arts of the Postcolonial World

The Shapes of Things to Come in Indian Science Fiction. Narrative and Style in Manjula Padmanabhan and Vandana Singh

Tabish Khair. Night of Happiness

Il Tolomeo, 2019

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Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts

English language education in India today

Peter Lang, 2012

Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures

This talk intends to critically read the interrelated notions of precarity, postcolonial tourism ... more This talk intends to critically read the interrelated notions of precarity, postcolonial tourism and environmentalism by examining some of its textual manifestations in both literary and non-literary forms (Burch 2012; Carrigan 2012). Today it is a kind of truism to affirm that India is experiencing a growing emergence of tourism, thanks to a number of recent successful campaigns of promotion, but its impact upon local communities and ecologies may sometimes coincide with processes of exoticization and marginalization, which impose, and perpetuate, a sense of (hidden) precarity, especially when the so-called "minority" groups are concerned. My focus will be on the geographical, cultural and social context of the Andaman Islands (Sen 2017) as a case study to discuss discourses of asymmetrical power relations and reconfigurations of indigenous identity. In particular, I aim to question the linguistic, narrative, and multimodal representation of Adivasi subjects, landscape and uncertainty by taking into account 1) the Indian English fictional domain, with examples from human rights literature (Garg 2016) as well as young adult fiction (Gangopadhyay 2010), and 2) the multimodal dimension, with materials such as the official Andaman and Nicobar Tourism website (https://www.andamantourism.gov.in/Default.html), with its multiple attention-getting strategies. My methodological background will benefit from the combination of postcolonial studies, stylistics and critical discourse analysis (

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Identity, Split-Self and Translingual Narrative in Jhumpa Lahiri

CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2017

This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interconnection between identity, translingu... more This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interconnection between identity, translingualism and split-self in the non-fictional production of Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali American author, focusing in particular on her In altre parole (2015), a text originally written in Italian. Moving across languages and cultures, Lahiri interrogates her own sense of identity by considering the nodes of tradition and transformation, in particular through her crucial translingual practice, thus shifting away from English and adopting Italian as a professional literary language. The outcome is a hybrid text that can be approached via the notion of “split self” (Emmott 2002), i.e. the plural manifestations of consciousness in its various expressive forms. The investigation will be conducted by applying an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the methodological tools and frames of postcolonial studies, narratology and cognitive poetics.

Indefinite identity: the textual construction of ambiguitey in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

What’s in a Curry? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Indian Food Discourse

Textus, 2019

A Passage to Gibraltar: Alterity and Representation in M. G. Sanchez

Review of Emilia Di Martino, Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction: Analyzing Geordie Stylizations

Bhagat, Chetan (2015). <em>Making India Awesome</em>. New Delhi: Rupa, pp. 177

˜Il œTolomeo, 2016

Sanchez, M.G. (2015). <em>Solitude House</em>. Huntingdon: Rock Scorpion Books, pp. 292

˜Il œTolomeo, 2015

Indian English across Texts and Discourses

Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts

More than Language and Literature: Postcolonial Connections and Linguistic Paradigms in Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s Indian English Fiction

Identity, language and place: reassessing macabre and funeral places as sites of cultural promotion from dark tourism to the interdisciplinary project 'tutTO sotTO

Emilia Di Martino, Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction: Analyzing Geordie Stylizations (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 159 pp., ISBN: 978-0-367-22680-0

Download

In Other Pictures : Translating Cultures, Translating Comics in Kari

In Other Pictures : Translating Cultures, Translating Comics in Kari, 2016

(Article included in O. Palusci and K. Russo, eds, 2016, Translating East and West, Trento: Tangr... more

XXVIII AIA Conference The railway as a creative linguistic domain in Indian travel writing

Download

A few notes on PASS, a European project for language education

Contemporary Sites of Chaos in the Literatures and Arts of the Postcolonial World

The Shapes of Things to Come in Indian Science Fiction. Narrative and Style in Manjula Padmanabhan and Vandana Singh

Tabish Khair. Night of Happiness

Il Tolomeo, 2019

Download

Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts

English language education in India today

Peter Lang, 2012

Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures

Download

Identity, Split-Self and Translingual Narrative in Jhumpa Lahiri

CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2017

Railway Discourse

This volume examines the train trope in a variety of cultural, literary and linguistic contexts, ... more This volume examines the train trope in a variety of cultural, literary and linguistic contexts, from contemporary crime fiction and dystopian graphic narratives to postcolonial railway travelogues, by employing a range of methods and frameworks. Situated within the “Discourse, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics” collection, the book critically engages with significant areas such as discourse and narrative structure. Interpreting the railway as a powerful cultural and imaginary site in the English-speaking world that traverses a range of creative domains, this study explores the ways in which the train and its structures, symbols and metaphors are textually rendered and the type of stylistic effects they generate in readers. It introduces, frames and discusses the idea of railway discourse and focuses on specific case studies (The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, the graphic novel Snowpiercer and Monisha Rajesh’s Around India in 80 Trains). In particular, it considers how a compartment window can constrain, and shape, the point of view of a narrator, the way in which science fiction trains are conceptually imagined, and the intercultural implications of rail travel writing in India today. To analyse the role and meaning of the railway in these texts, and compare them with others, this work adopts and adapts analytical tools and critical concepts from the integration of different fields, such as stylistics and linguistics, postcolonial criticism and literary studies.

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Sulle vie della cultura

by Esterino Adami, Laura Ramello, and Antonella Amatuzzi

La rivalutazione di beni culturali di svariata natura, materiali e immateriali, raramente percepi... more La rivalutazione di beni culturali di svariata natura, materiali e immateriali, raramente percepiti come ‘oggetti turistici’, quali punti di interesse dislocati su itinerari insoliti, può divenire una risorsa destinata ad avere ricadute pratiche per lo sviluppo sociale, economico e culturale dei territori coinvolti. Questa sfida implica però una gestione sinergica fra discipline umanistiche e discipline economico-aziendali. D’altronde, ormai le humanities hanno preso coscienza delle proprie capacità di transitare dalla ricerca di base alla ricerca applicata e, nel contempo, il valore della cultura umanistica è sempre più riconosciuto in ambito economico.
Con l’iniziativa di indire un “Anno dei cammini d’Italia” per il 2016, il Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo ha inteso avviare una serie di azioni che promuovessero la riflessione scientifica su queste tematiche favorendo il coinvolgimento di Università e Istituti di ricerca.
Attraverso tre ‘itinerari’ (Camminatori e viaggiatori di ieri e di oggi: vie della Storia e della Cultura vissute e narrate; Cammini linguistici e culturali nel tempo: percorsi di parole e scritture; Cammini in costruzione oggi per il domani: le vie della cultura come risorsa per il territorio) che stimolano il confronto fra competenze, esperienze e professionalità diverse, il volume, a vocazione dichiaratamente interdisciplinare, mira a coniugare saperi umanistici e culture management ai fini di riscoprire, analizzare, e comprendere un patrimonio dinamico e plurale, le cui anime si intrecciano nel tempo e nello spazio.
Il volume riunisce saggi di Esterino Adami, Carlos Alvar, Antonella Amatuzzi, Laurence Audéoud, Alex Borio, Daniela Broglio, Valter Cantino, Mirko Casagranda, Damiano Cortese, Eleonora Federici, Elisabetta Nicola, Marco Piccat, Laura Ramello, Adeline Rucquoi, Renata Santoro, Cristina Trinchero.

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Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness

by Esterino Adami, Francesca Bellino, and Alessandro Mengozzi

The papers collected in this volume deal with the explorations of Science Fiction, Fantasy and, m... more The papers collected in this volume deal with the explorations of Science Fiction, Fantasy and, more generally, the representation of otherness through the narrative construction of fantastic, imaginary, appalling or attractive places, stories and figures. Contributions are arranged in four main sections. The first section (Other spaces, new worlds) deals with Hindi and Arabic Science Fiction. The second section (Constructing forms of otherness) analyses the narrative and psychological mechanisms that give forms to a stereotype or archetypical image of the threatening Other. The third section ((Re)shaping style(s), language(s) and discourse(s) of otherness) is centred on the idea of language as a tool to build up styles, genres and texts, and literature as an escape from disappointing history and a cross-cultural wandering space of narrative ghosts. The fourth section (Circulating fearful otherness) tests the limits and heuristic potential of a philological approach in reconstructing the wide circulation of motifs and characters from antiquity to (post-)modernity.

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The Shadow Lines Thirty Years After International Conference Call for Papers

by Alessandro Vescovi, Carmen Concilio, and Esterino Adami

International Conference "The Shadow LInes Thirty Years After" Milano and Torino 12-13 November 2018

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COVER CROSSING THE SHADOW LINES 2020

by Carmen Concilio, Esterino Adami, and Alessandro Vescovi

Quadri. Quaderni di Ricognizioni, 2020

Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), was notoriously conceived in 1984, in the a... more Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), was notoriously conceived in 1984, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when Delhi was upturned by bloodthirsty mobs that attacked the Sikh community killing, raping, and looting. This was the “madeleine” that brought the would-be novelist (he was halfway through writing The Circle of Reason) back to 1964, when a similar mob attacked Hindus in Dhaka, where Ghosh, then a child, was living with his family. Thus The Shadow Lines became a historical novel about Bengal in the Sixties, a portrait of post-Independence India, a Bildungsroman, or indeed a Künstlerroman, about a young Bengali, an Indian reply to both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915) and Remembrance of Time Past (1922) that enthused a generation of Indian intellectuals. Indeed, The Shadow Lines is the first and so far only novel by a living author to be included in University syllabi all over India. Unsurprisingly this is, among Ghosh’s books, the most written about, especially in South Asia. The Shadow Lines has gained enormous resonance in postcolonial studies as it touches upon some of the major issues in the fields of colonial history, national identities, memory, and borders. Likewise, the novel has been seminal in the definition and discussion of a postcolonial geography that challenges the current cartographical order. It has drawn from the literary tradition of the past and has influenced new literary productions, as the variety of international scholarly essays in this collection demonstrate.

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Esterino Adami

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