Translating America. The Circulation of Narratives, Commodities, and Ideas Across the Atlantic.

The twenty essays gathered in the volume try to represent and problematize the cultural circulation that has always characterized the relationship between Europe and the US, necessarily also involving North and South America. And it is precisely the circulation they highlight: of models and of goods, of myths, of languages, texts and cultural objects, through the translation from one natural language to another but also from one code to another, through adaptation, domestication and re-imagination, at all levels of the cultural semiosphere. Consequently, most contributions function like films, or lab reports, showing how semiosis works at every cultural level, how and why ideas and objects, even goods that were meant to be simply commodities, conquests of the economic market, are transformed into artistic and cultural tools, given imaginary and life values and thus nourishing a new cycle of cultural production and innovation.