Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

Anchorites and their texts, such as <i>Ancrene Wisse</i>, have recently undergone a reevaluation based on material circumstances, not just theological import. The articles here address a variety of anchoritic or anchoritic-adjacent texts, encompassing guidance literature, hagiographies, miracle narratives, medical discourse, and mystic prose, and spanning in date from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Exploring reclusion and materiality, the collection addresses a series of overlapping themes, including the importance of touch, the limits of religious authority, and the role of the senses. Objects, metaphorical and real, embodied and spiritual, populate the pages. These categories are permeable, with flexible and porous boundaries, demonstrating the conflation of ideas, concepts, and manifestations in medieval materiality. In fact, the permeability of these categories demonstrates how materiality can reshape our approach to medieval texts. It leaves room for directions for future study, including the application of material analysis to previously unstudied objects, spaces, and literary artifacts.

Interdiscourse as Inherent Characteristic of Institutional Discourse (on the Example of Educational Discourse)

The article is devoted to the types of interaction of educational discourse with other types of institutional communication: political, economic and medical. The author studies how fragments of discourse function and form semantic potential in official styles of speech where interdiscourse is traditional and describes forms of discourse genre interference caused by global events of 2020: coronavirus epidemic, presidential election in the USA and others. In the article educational discourse is understood in its broad sense which allows to examine the periphery of discourse practice where communication of individuals of equal status and variety of functional styles are natural. The process of interference is studied on micro and meso levels of discourse where certain lexico-sematic fields, key-words, clichs which characterize professional genres of communication serve as markers of interdiscourse and on macro level where historical and social context is considered to define functional styles. Methods of descriptive, discourse and contextual analyses are implemented. The author draws the conclusion that on all levels of institutional interaction the elements of educational discourse are semiotic components of communication, can serve as means of representation of political, economic or medical discourse practice, have pragmatic potential and can be used in argumentative or informative speech strategies the choice of which depends on the type of discourse. On macro level elements of educational discourse often extend beyond specific concepts limited to professional subjects and the discourse itself becomes a part of a bigger subordinating discourse formation.

Communicating Across Cultures and Languages in the Health Care Setting. Claire Penn & Jennifer Watermeyer. Palgrave Macmillan, UK. 368 Pp. ISBN 978-1-137-58100-6

The book under review presents the challenging and creative research endeavours concerning some peculiar characteristics of multicultural and multilingual communication in South African healthcare settings. The authors of this work – Claire Penn, a professor and director of the Health Communication Research Unit, and Jennifer Watermeyer, an associate professor in the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, – focus on bridging the gap between the voices of the lifeworld and the voices of medicine via communication characterized by the complexities and pitfalls within culturally and linguistically diverse health care contexts. The research under review is aimed at analyzing the cognitive space of professional medical communication in healthcare settings for applying the results in practice. Research of the cross-language interactions in healthcare facilities (using the evidence from South African medical settings) certainly contributes a lot to establishing an adequate cultural brokers’ role in the professional communication and to describing methods aimed at modifying interactions between a healthcare professional and a patient, which taken together lead to the improvement of medical communication in general. This book is a reasonably valuable source of essential knowledge for both healthcare professionals, linguists, discourse analysis researchers, medical educators and practitioners, and for those people who are interested in the specificities of communication research projects in terms of professional medical discourse on the global scale.

Health Promotion Discourse in Modern Media (Based on the Texts of the National Health Service, United Kingdom)

Health promotion discourse is a relevant object of linguistic analysis as in its texts verbal and non-verbal means of communication are used to make a pragmatic impact on the largest possible audience. This article aimed to identify the characteristic features of health promotion discourse in modern British media. The material included texts on obesity published on the official website of the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom, which represents government policy in the health sector. The study applied the methods of descriptive interpretive analysis, as well as contextual, and discourse analysis. This paper defines health promotion discourse as a communicative interaction on disease prevention issues and health awareness. In addition, it indicates the main features of media texts and their implementation in health promotion discourse. The authors found that NHS media texts on health promotion are characterized by common features of media discourse: a specific topic-based structure, an active usage of visual and graphic techniques, as well as multimodality, interactivity, and coverage of burning issues (health-related, in this case). Moreover, these texts have features inherent in media texts of online medical discourse, such as linguistic and therapeutic orientation (reflected in speech acts of advice expressed with varying degrees of categoricalness), targeted inclusiveness, and stylistic convergence (mixing of different functional styles). In addition, on the basis of the material studied, the paper identifies the following strategies specific to health promotion media texts: personal choice, developing trust in the author, and creating an image of the author as a friend. These strategies act as tools to achieve the main function of health promotion discourse, i.e. to influence the readers in order to maintain their health and prevent diseases.

Linguocognitive Specifics of the Disease Myth

The article deals with the question of cancer myth representation in the popular science medical discourse. This study is carried out according to the linguocultural approach to the study of the cancer myth, which is based on the reconsideration of linguocultural phenomena. Myths about diseases are of linguistic and cultural significance and they are passed down from generation to generation. Those of phenomena that are incomprehensible and frightening are considered to cause additional associations. Cancer diseases refer to such linguocultural phenomena. Myths about diseases reflect the results of this or that form of reconsideration or experience of some phenomena by a particular linguocultural society. The work provides the definitions of the notions myth and disease. The methodology of the study is based on the research by foreign and Russian scientists in the field of study of the notions of myth and disease as semiotic systems. The popular science medical survey The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee served as a research background. It analyses the way the disease myth actualizes in the popular science medical discourse. It shows a mythological plot (or mythological information) to get actualized in a particular situation by means of reference, and the way it contributes to the explication of a particular disease myth. Neither the subject of the message nor the plot of the myth is of importance for the reader, only the influence of the myth on the patients representations of disorder and his emotional state and on the society as a whole makes sense. The study helps conclude that mythological information representing the disease myth is nationally and socially marked, and is characterized by a particular conceptual presentation and is expressed by different linguistic means.

I Disturbi Alimentari Nella Narrativa Femminile Italiana Dall'unità al Miracolo Economico: Eating Disorders in Italian Women's Writings From Unification to the Economic Boom

<p>In the feminist discourse about women’s relationship with food developed in the 1970s and 1980s, eating disorders are perceived as a complex reaction to traditional models of female identity. In the writings of Kim Chernin, Marilyn Lawrence, Morag MacSween and Susie Orbach, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and other atypical relationships with food and body emerge as an unidiomatic language adopted by women to communicate what words cannot express. Paradoxically, eating disorders become instruments of selfempowerment: on the one hand, unconventional eaters develop abnormal attitudes towards their bodies, but on the other hand, by employing such metaphorical language, they find a way to question the social constrictions and cultural contradictions of women’s position in patriarchal culture. Italian women writers have portrayed openly anorexic, bulimic and compulsive eaters in the characters of their novels and autobiographies since the late 1980s. From Clara Sereni’s pioneering Casalinghitudine (1987) to Michela Marzano’s controversial Volevo essere una farfalla (2011), the fictional depiction of eating disorders in Italian literature has increased epidemically in the last few decades, mirroring the rapid spread of these syndromes. However, as I suggest in my thesis, since the late nineteenth century, when anorexia was officially diagnosed by the medical discourse, Italian women writers such as Neera (1848-1918), Sibilla Aleramo (1876-1960), Wanda Bontà (1902-1986), Paola Masino (1908-1989), Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) and others have presented in their fiction a variety of female characters who experience a troubled relationship with their body and with food. In each case, this is coupled with the portrayal of the rebellious feelings that the characters experience towards women’s preestablished social roles. In Neera’s Teresa (1886) and L’indomani (1889), in Aleramo’s Una donna (1906), in Bontà’s Signorinette (1938), Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (1945) and in Ginzburg’s “La madre” (1948) and Le voci della sera (1961), as well as other narrative works, the authors do not use the medical terminology of eating disorders in order to illustrate their protagonists’ eating problems, but they often depict behaviours which recall anorexic and bulimic attitudes, as described by the scientific discourse on these pathologies. The anorexic symptoms displayed by the characters become therefore their unspoken protest against the socio-cultural constrictions imposed on Italian women. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I frame my analysis of modern and contemporary Italian women’s fiction within the feminist perspectives on anorexia, bulimia and binge eating developed in the 1970s and 1980s. By doing so, I attempt to decode a controversial female experience and the language Italian women writers used to express it before it became officially acknowledged as a pathology that reflects women’s anxiety about their identity. Long before feminist scholars identified the strong link between social context and eating disorders in the closing decades of the twentieth century, these writers depict women using the languages of food and the body as one of the possible means of rebelling against patriarchal repression.</p>

I Disturbi Alimentari Nella Narrativa Femminile Italiana Dall'unità al Miracolo Economico: Eating Disorders in Italian Women's Writings From Unification to the Economic Boom

<p>In the feminist discourse about women’s relationship with food developed in the 1970s and 1980s, eating disorders are perceived as a complex reaction to traditional models of female identity. In the writings of Kim Chernin, Marilyn Lawrence, Morag MacSween and Susie Orbach, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and other atypical relationships with food and body emerge as an unidiomatic language adopted by women to communicate what words cannot express. Paradoxically, eating disorders become instruments of selfempowerment: on the one hand, unconventional eaters develop abnormal attitudes towards their bodies, but on the other hand, by employing such metaphorical language, they find a way to question the social constrictions and cultural contradictions of women’s position in patriarchal culture. Italian women writers have portrayed openly anorexic, bulimic and compulsive eaters in the characters of their novels and autobiographies since the late 1980s. From Clara Sereni’s pioneering Casalinghitudine (1987) to Michela Marzano’s controversial Volevo essere una farfalla (2011), the fictional depiction of eating disorders in Italian literature has increased epidemically in the last few decades, mirroring the rapid spread of these syndromes. However, as I suggest in my thesis, since the late nineteenth century, when anorexia was officially diagnosed by the medical discourse, Italian women writers such as Neera (1848-1918), Sibilla Aleramo (1876-1960), Wanda Bontà (1902-1986), Paola Masino (1908-1989), Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) and others have presented in their fiction a variety of female characters who experience a troubled relationship with their body and with food. In each case, this is coupled with the portrayal of the rebellious feelings that the characters experience towards women’s preestablished social roles. In Neera’s Teresa (1886) and L’indomani (1889), in Aleramo’s Una donna (1906), in Bontà’s Signorinette (1938), Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (1945) and in Ginzburg’s “La madre” (1948) and Le voci della sera (1961), as well as other narrative works, the authors do not use the medical terminology of eating disorders in order to illustrate their protagonists’ eating problems, but they often depict behaviours which recall anorexic and bulimic attitudes, as described by the scientific discourse on these pathologies. The anorexic symptoms displayed by the characters become therefore their unspoken protest against the socio-cultural constrictions imposed on Italian women. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I frame my analysis of modern and contemporary Italian women’s fiction within the feminist perspectives on anorexia, bulimia and binge eating developed in the 1970s and 1980s. By doing so, I attempt to decode a controversial female experience and the language Italian women writers used to express it before it became officially acknowledged as a pathology that reflects women’s anxiety about their identity. Long before feminist scholars identified the strong link between social context and eating disorders in the closing decades of the twentieth century, these writers depict women using the languages of food and the body as one of the possible means of rebelling against patriarchal repression.</p>

Medical Books of the 17th–18th Centuries from the Siberian Archives: Structural-and-Grammatical Aspect

The article presents a comparative study of two medical books from the Siberian archives dating back to the 17 th –18 th centuries: Tobolsk Lechebnik (TL) kept in Tobolsk Book Depository, and Altai Lechebnik (AL) stored in Altai Museum of Local Lore – both stemming from the text of the medical book called "Prokhladnyi Vertograd (The Cool Garden)" from the collection of the Rumyantsev Museum (PV). Our findings show that Siberian medical books demonstrate different degrees of structural and grammatical transformation of the source PV text, conventionally considered by the authors of the research to be a list, which is chronologically closer to the original text. It was established that TL can be regarded as a list derived from the PV, and AL – a source reflecting a further stage in the process of text generation in the institutional medical discourse. We claim that the intentional and grammatical perspective of the medical text formation is associated with the modal variability of verbal lexemes: the prevailing in PV and TL personal verb forms reflect the presence of the subject of speech as an agent in special communication; in AL these are replaced by infinitives which transform the real modality of the message about an action "from experience" (in PV and TL) into a syntactic categorical imperative.It was also determined that the subject of the action expressed by personal verb forms is typically generalized (in this case, special actions of the doctor and the patient can be detected through the difference in the verbal lexemes). The subject is not grammatically defined with the infinitive verb forms.

La Foi expérimentale: Lourdes d'Émile Zola

This article would like to show the rhetorical ambivalence of Émile Zola's Lourdes, in which the naturalist method (seeing, showing) is the one used by the young Sophie Couteau to convince her audience of the miracle of which she is the lucky one. It is precisely the paradox of this novel to denounce the religious imposture and the commercialization of the miracle, while underlining the similarity of the methods employed by the religious discourse, the medical discourse and by the naturalist novel.