The Premotional Representation of Modern and Ancient Sea-migrations through Multimodal Discourse Hybridization and ELF Experiential Reformulations

This chapter reports on the latest stage of a research project that is being carried out at the University of Salento. The project’s main aim is the ‘emotional promotion’ of cross-cultural integration by creating multimodal compositions where images, sound and words interact so as to induce in viewers a re-evaluation of the reasons behind migrations, as well as a reconsideration of the common experiential schemata of ancient and modern sea-odysseys. This study focuses on a two-phase research activity involving tourists and migrants living alongside one another in seaside resorts in the Apulian district of Lecce. The analysis of Phase 1 explores the experiential reformulation strategies, through English, of a selected corpus of extracts from the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The label ‘experiential’ means that the phonetic and verbal features of English in the retextualizations are selected by the authors of the reformulations to reproduce the sensations of fear, despair and hope that belong to the several phases of migrants’ journeys. The description of Phase 2 details the audiovisual strategies of genre hybridization between the ‘mockumentary’ and ‘journalistic interview’ genres, which are activated to produce a video that is envisaged as a way to promote intercultural integration via social media. The multimodal analysis of the video illustrates the extent to which the association between images depicting migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea and the experiential retextualizations serve to achieve the communicative goals of attracting the viewers’ attention and uncovering the actual nature of sea traveling.