A Multimodal Approach to the Experiential Reformulations of Ancient Epic Narratives for the Emotional Promotion of Salento as Wonderland in Responsible Tourism

This paper reports on a case study regarding the multimodal composition of audiovisual messages (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) to promote a different perception of holiday places in Southern Italy affected by mass migrations (Facchini et al. 2009). In particular, the production of a video that emphasizes the dramatic and epic nature of contemporary migrants’ journeys towards Utopian places is meant to produce a positive effect on the audience’s knowledge of such a controversial social phenomenon, in opposition to the dominant discursive frame (Bruno 2016) that connects migrants’ odysseys with intercultural conflicts (Branton and Dunaway 2009). Moreover, this case study represents an extension of previous research on ‘premotional’ multimodal messages devised for the ‘emotional promotion’ (“premotion” – Guido et al. 2016) of Responsible Tourism (Prayag et al. 2013; Lin et al. 2014) in the Salento area, affected by an increase in migrant arrivals (Guido et al. 2016, forthcoming; Iaia 2017). The audiovisual advertisement produced in the context of the present case study is, in fact, supposed to be available on the Internet to potential international tourists who may choose to visit the Salento area not despite the presence of communities of migrants and refugees, but precisely because of them, as they are associated to the archetypal representation of the ancient voyagers – such as Ulysses – in search of Utopia, belonging to the classical epic tradition still permeating Salento as an ancient Magna Grecia territory. Such a re-narration of migration events stems from a multimodal blend of the verbal, visual and acoustic levels that reinforce the schematic representation of migrants as ‘voyagers’ who start epic journeys in search of utopian places of peace, hybridization of cultures and languages, and better life conditions. In this sense, the audiovisual advertisement of Salento accounts for retextualization strategies into modern variations of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) (Guido 2008, 2012), accessible to tourists as well as migrants, of a selected corpus of Ancient Greek narrations from book V of Homer’s Odyssey, when Ogygia, Calypso’s island, is initially seen as a heavenly Utopian place. Such ELF reformulations of Ancient Greek verses are embedded in the audiovisual composition in order to emphasize the extent to which the interaction between verses, images of real migrations and acoustic score enables the interpretations of the premotional illocutionary force (Austin 1962) of the video, which is opposed to the dominant ideological connotation (Fairclough 2015) of the dreadful voyages in mass-media representations (Bruno 2016).