The North seen by People from the South. Italian Explorers about the Arctic. The Journal of Giacomo Bove

Elizaveta Khachaturyan

doi:10.7557/13.1256

Authors

Elizaveta Khachaturyan University of Oslo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1256

Keywords:

Litteratur, italiensk, Giacomo Bove, Vega,

Abstract

The objects of my analysis are the travel writings and expedition reports of Italian Arctic explorers. In the present paper I will analyse the Journal of Giacomo Bove, who was a member of the Swedish Arctic expedition of the ship "Vega" (1878-79) headed by Nordenskjold (Il Passaggio del Nord-Est. Spedizione artica svedese della "Vega". Diario di Giacomo Bove. A cura del dott. A. Fresa, 1940, Memorie della R. Società Geografica Italiana, volume XIX. Roma.). One of the tasks given to Giacomo Bove by the Italian Geographic Society was to describe the expedition. One of the problems that Bove had to solve in this case was which words to use when speaking of an alien reality. This other reality was for him constituted not only by natural phenomena (like, i.e., fauna and flora, ice and weather), but also by an unfamiliar material culture (the life of the northern people), and by the life of the expedition.

Author Biography

Elizaveta Khachaturyan, University of Oslo

Elizaveta Khachaturyan is Associate Professor of Italian Language at the University of Oslo. Her research (based on the contrastive description of Italian, French and Russian) deals with the analysis of the discourse, in particularly with discourse strategies and the semantics of discourse markers. Recently she started also a research on Italian Arctic explorers speaking about the North: how to speak about the surrounding world.