| dc.description.abstract | In The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), David Spurr analyzes journalistic discourse on the Third
World and isolates a nucleus of rhetorical figures around which representations of the
colonial and post-colonial other are articulated. In this paper, I will borrow, in particular,
three of these rhetorical figures (naturalization, idealization, appropriation) and I will adapt
them to the context of contemporary Anglo-American representations of Italian culture in
popular literature. I will argue that a substantial number of contemporary works on Italy
retains the basic assumption of a world ordered around a dichotomy between modern cul-
tures and pre-modern ones, and makes of this taxonomy the basic spatiotemporal context
for its narratives. | en_US |
