Obama: Four More Years

Do election campaigns change anything? After all the months of mobilization and all the money spent in a handful of battleground states, the outcome of the 2012 election closely reflected certain fundamental shifts in American society that were largely set long before Election Day. The article examines those fundamental factors, and explains how they shaped the 2012 presidential campaign and ultimately produced Obama's victory. The article also discusses some of the longer-term implications of the 2012 results.

This brief essay deals, in essentials, with both the content of Obama' s character-borrowing Martin Luther King's words - and with some of the main elements of his political culture. Both character and culture have been made detectible in his words, his deeds, and through the perceptions others have had of him. His biography is well known by now, thanks to what he has written about himself, and what biographers have added, uncovered, interpreted. His personality has been scrutinized by psychologists, his words analyzed by linguists, and his behavior as a politician and President of the United States studied and commented upon by political scientists, essayists, and journalists. Little of importance is unknown of him, at this point. Thus, the author gives an illustration and a synthesis - and a tentative interpretation - of how political issues become personal issues in President Obama's life, as Michelle Obama said at the Democratic convention, last September.

The essay investigates the role women and LGBT voters have played in 2012 presidential elections. In particular, the author highlights how gender issues have always been highly relevant in shaping social policies, and especially employment and welfare issues, being women and LGBT people the most vulnerable subjects in a system that privileges the traditional (heterosexual) family. In this sense, the radically different approach of Democrats and Republicans to gender issues had a strong impact not only on the specific gender related themes debated during the campaign, but also on the rhetoric through which Obama and Romney constructed their own images as candidates, and ideas of family and society strategically mobilized in their speeches.

This essay, which is inspired by the late Edmondo Berselli's remarks about politics as television format, situates political debates in the distinctive communication pattern of the medium, pinpointing their similarities with some of the most popular television genres, like sports matches or game shows. Then, the essay moves on to a more specific and in-depth analysis of the four presidential and vice-presidential debates of the Obama-Romney campaign of 2012, focusing its attention on the connotative features of the candidates' performances and the registered impacts on the public's mood.

Democrats are happy for the results of the 2012 elections: they won the Presidency, they gained seats in the Senate and they reduced the gap in the House, a success limited by the 2011 redistricting which was mostly controlled by the Republicans. The 113th Congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse in history, but the representation of the minorities is still not in direct ratio to the population. And because the Tea Party incumbents performed relatively well, it is possible to predict that the new House is going to be polarized once again.

This essay provides a contrastive analysis of the original British TV series The Office, its U.S. version, and their dubbing into Italian. It focuses on the translation and adaptation of culture-specific references to British and U.S. culture, such as history, politics, music, cinema, television, commercial brands, etc. Elements of inconsistency in the use of foreignizating and domesticating techniques are observed, and placed within a context of cultural change and globalization, where the boundaries between 'source' and 'target' lingua-culture are increasingly blurred, and new technologies make viewers more independent in decoding the original text. These recent developments in society seem to be leading to a shift in the role and profession of audiovisual translators.

Five years after his death, David Foster Wallace is universally considered one of the most original and important writers of his generation, with a wide amount of followers and a kind of cult surrounding him both in academia and on the Internet. Yet, his critical standing and his place inside the canon of contemporary American fiction are still to be seriously considered and debated. Whereas many critics have looked at DFW as a late postmodernist, concentrating on metafictional techniques in his novels and short stories, Wallace's relationship with the last American Avant-garde is much more complex and dialectical. Starting from other writers' often conflicting approaches to DFW (from Jonathan Franzen to Don DeLillo and George Saunders'), the present essay analyses Wallace's poetics through his interviews and his celebrated essay E Unibus Pluram, focusing on his fight against loneliness and passivity in the era of television, his search for a new "sincerity" in fiction, and his special relationship to filmmaker David Lynch and his masterpiece Blue Velvet.

In this essay, Ed Finn considers David Foster Wallace's legacy through his communities of readership on Amazon. Drawing on the methodological frameworks of network analysis and distant reading, the author compares professional reviews on Wallace, written by literary critics for specialized and general interest periodicals, with consumer reviews on Amazon, posted by everyday readers who either purchase or are simply interested in Wallace's works. As the analysis demonstrates, professional reviews tend to contextualize Wallace within the boundaries of a quite fixed reference canon (Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth), highlighting his literary debt to such authors and sometimes his lackings when compared with them. By contrast, reviews and book recommendations on Amazon reveal that everyday readers seem to roam around more freely in the field of popular literature, connecting Wallace's works with postmodernism, Melville, Shakespeare, and his own contemporaries, thus showing a more genuine and playful response to Wallace's invitation to become engaged readers in the game of interpretation.

Focusing on the theoretical approaches of translation and adaptation studies, this essay explores the way the Australian director Ray Lawrence has transposed onto the screen one of Raymond Carver's most anthologized short stories, So Much Water So Close to Home. The present article analyzes how the cinematic adaptation relates to its source and, more specifically, the changes Lawrence has brought about in Carver's ur-text in order to reproduce - or create ex novo - the semantic and syntactic, as well as the stylistic and emotional effects to which the model originally tends.