ELF Narratives of Ancient and Modern 'Odysseys' across the Mediterranean Sea: An Experiential-Linguistic Approach to the Marketing of Responsible Tourism

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary research exploring the emotional experience of Italian seaside resorts whose geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean coasts has always determined their destiny as places of hospitality and hybridization of languages and cultures. A cognitive-pragmatic model of Experiential Linguistics and some strategies of Experiential Place Marketing will be applied to the ‘emotional promotion’ of Responsible Tourism in order to enquire into the effects of emotions upon the tourists’ perception of the holiday as an experience of ‘personal and cultural growth’. This is expected to develop from their appraisal of (a) non-western migrants’ dramatic narrations of journeys across the sea, reported in their variations of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF), and (b) epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘Utopian destinations’ belonging to the western cultural heritage, translated from ancient (Greek and Latin) into modern ELF variations. The target of the marketing plan are tourists playing the role of ‘intercultural mediators’ with migrants in one of the seaside resorts of Salento, a southern-Italian area affected by migrant arrivals. To facilitate the tourists’ process of ‘experiential embodiment’ of past and present dramatic sea voyages, the cultural project of Responsible Tourism is designed to introduce tourists and migrants to an ‘Ethnopoetic analysis’ of two corpora of modern and ancient oral sea voyage narratives – the former collected during ethnographic fieldworks in reception centres for refugees, and the latter including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The purpose is to directly involve tourists and migrants as if they were ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’ exploring how such ancient and modern oral narratives are organized into spontaneous ‘verse structures’ reproducing the sequences and rhythms of human actions and emotions in response to the traumatic experience of violent natural phenomena which, through the use of ergative syntactic structures, become metaphorically personified as mythological monsters, or as objects and elements endowed with an autonomous, dynamic force capable of destroying the human beings at their mercy. The Ethnopoetic analysis and translation, together with the subsequent multimodal rendering of such journey narratives into a promotional video for place-marketing purposes aim at making both tourists and migrants aware of the common socio-cultural values of the different populations that have produced them.