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"Heart of My Race:" Questions of ldentity in Sicilian/American Writings
Title
"Heart of My Race:" Questions of ldentity in Sicilian/American Writings.
Creator
Mazzucchelli, Chiara, Tamburri, Anthony J., Florida Atlantic University
Abstract/Description
Throughout the 1900s, the sense of a distinct sicilianita-or Sicilian-nessmanifested itself in writings by Italian authors such as Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia, Vincenzo Consolo, and Andrea Camilleri, among others. Interestingly, a parallel phenomenon has emerged in the United States in the broader field of Italian-American literature. While attempting to redefine the concept of Americanness and expand the canon of American literature so that it embraces articulations...
Show moreThroughout the 1900s, the sense of a distinct sicilianita-or Sicilian-nessmanifested itself in writings by Italian authors such as Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia, Vincenzo Consolo, and Andrea Camilleri, among others. Interestingly, a parallel phenomenon has emerged in the United States in the broader field of Italian-American literature. While attempting to redefine the concept of Americanness and expand the canon of American literature so that it embraces articulations of ethnic identities, many Sicilian-American writers have turned their works into literary manifestations of their Sicilian Americanness, or, as I have called it, sicilianamericanita. In this study, I try to answer questions such as: Why and how have some Sicilian- American authors fashioned their Italian-American identity in regional terms? How did a sense of sicilianita develop in the US and turn into sicilianamericanita? And how did the above-mentioned phenomenon materialize in Italian-American literature? My examination focused on Jerre Mangione's memoirs, Rose Romano's poetry, and Ben Morreale's novels. While Mangione consistently capitalized on his regional ethnic identity mainly in order to correct some of the most unfavorable prejudices, and especially those originating from Mafia, Rose Romano writes poetry and prose dealing with issues of regional self-ascription which overlaps with contestations of traditional gender roles, heterosexual scripts, and racial categorizations. Ben Morreale's sicilianamericanita takes on intertextual aspects, creating a closely-knit net of relations with the Sicilian tradition in Italian literature. Many Sicilian-American writers, just like their Sicilian counterparts, have come to see their regional ethnic identity as a source of inspiration for the growth of a distinctive literary tradition. This study has been conceived as an initial small step towards a process of inquiry and exploration of the common ground between Italian and Italian-American literatures. Such critical endeavors and international cooperation between both fields of literary studies could bring forth a better understanding of the cultures, and also strengthen in significant ways the status of both literatures within and outside their respective national critical communities.
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Date Issued
2007
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00000985
Subject Headings
Italian literature--Italy--Sicily--Criticism and interpretation, American literature--Italian American authors--Criticism and interpretation, National characteristics in literature, Influence (Literary, artistic, etc)
Format
Document (PDF)
father, the son and the sense of humor: The novels of John Fante
Title
The father, the son and the sense of humor: The novels of John Fante.
Creator
Pettener, Emanuele., Florida Atlantic University, Tamburri, Anthony J.
Abstract/Description
John Fante is a well-known novelist in Italy and Europe, but still very much unknown and unrecognized in the United States. Yet, John Fante is an American writer and, though his father came from Torricella Peligna---a small town in the middle of Italy---Fante did not speak Italian; he felt American and, most of all, he wanted to be considered an American writer. His novels are imbued with both "Italian Americanicity" as well as "Americanicity". In fact, throughout his eight novels, one of the...
Show moreJohn Fante is a well-known novelist in Italy and Europe, but still very much unknown and unrecognized in the United States. Yet, John Fante is an American writer and, though his father came from Torricella Peligna---a small town in the middle of Italy---Fante did not speak Italian; he felt American and, most of all, he wanted to be considered an American writer. His novels are imbued with both "Italian Americanicity" as well as "Americanicity". In fact, throughout his eight novels, one of the main topics is the American motif par excellence, the American Dream. What are the reasons for such a strange literary destiny? My dissertation begins with this question and tries to find an answer by analyzing the father-son relationship, the omnipresent theme in Fante's production. This relationship also represents the dichotomy old word/new word. Indeed, this relationship is the source of the American Dream (the dream of conquering America, transmitted from the father to the son) and the son's discovery of literature (the son begins to write in order to rebel against his father and his roots, and, at the same time, he writes about his father, and through writing understands his father and his roots). Fante depicts this father-son relationship with irony and satire, and most of all with humor. Humor, as it was defined by Luigi Pirandello's On Humor and by Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed, is the narrative tool rendering any statement made in a novel ambiguous and double-sided. Humor doubts any truth, and leaves the readers free to choose their own interpretation of the text, allowing them to be the masters of the text. It is not by chance that Fante has been discovered in the eighties, in the heart of the Postmodern Era, that which rejected any absolute truth, and considered humor and irony as the necessary tropes to perceive reality in its relative nature. Fante's triumph has taken place in Italy, a country that is postmodern not by theory but by essence, a fragmented and disillusioned country constituted by disillusioned readers, and not in America, the land of "how-to" manuals handing down easy truths to the general public.
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Date Issued
2004
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40386
Subject Headings
Fante, John,--1909---Criticism and interpretation, Authors, American--20th century---Criticism and interpretation, Screenwriters--United States--Criticism and interpretation
Format
Document (PDF)
value of worthless lives: Italian immigrant autobiographies by "ordinary people"
Title
The value of worthless lives: Italian immigrant autobiographies by "ordinary people".
Creator
Serra, Ilaria., Florida Atlantic University, Tamburri, Anthony J.
Abstract/Description
"Immigrants left tears and sweat, but no memories." This dissertation tries to prove this assertion by the Italian critic Giuseppe Prezzolini wrong. Italian immigrants have sweated and cried, but many of them also left a trace of their "heroic" voyage between two continents, and two worlds, that took place in waves during the entire XX Century. With an oxymoron, I will speak about the value of worthless lives. These authors are no conquerors, saints or celebrities, but they believe that their...
Show more"Immigrants left tears and sweat, but no memories." This dissertation tries to prove this assertion by the Italian critic Giuseppe Prezzolini wrong. Italian immigrants have sweated and cried, but many of them also left a trace of their "heroic" voyage between two continents, and two worlds, that took place in waves during the entire XX Century. With an oxymoron, I will speak about the value of worthless lives. These authors are no conquerors, saints or celebrities, but they believe that their life stories are worth being written and remembered. There are many direct ties between the experience of migration and the need to write an autobiography. Autobiography is a response to the trauma of immigration and provides a kind of sutura for a wounded subject. Besides, immigration creates the "individual." Immigration is a kind of Copernican revolution which destabilizes the sense of human self; the immigrant feels the ground shifting under his feet and loses the center of his life, his home. Autobiography thus becomes the tool to build his/her own centrality, his/her own identity as a particle of this chaotic universe. Furthermore, by migrating, the Italian contadino (the majority of them came from the countryside) leaves a land that kept his family tied down for centuries, but most of all leaves the soil of the amorphous "mass" of suffering farmers, and creates a new individual. But the individuality of Italian immigrant autobiographies is somehow different from the individuality of American autobiographies. Our "unorthodox" authors demand a new critical terminology inviting concepts such as "Quiet Individualism" and "Ethos of the Survivor." The dissertation presents a gallery of immigrant self-portraits: nine immigrant workers; five the immigrant workers with a political conscience; ten immigrant workers with a poet's soul (including a farmer and a stonecutter who wrote two remarkable chivalric poems); five immigrants with religious interests; seven immigrant artists; nine immigrant women; eight graduated immigrants; and finally five successful immigrants, perfectly integrated into American society. In all, fifty-eight portraits that tell life stories and provide us with a lived slice of immigration history.
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Date Issued
2004
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/12088
Subject Headings
Immigrants--United States--Biography, Italian Americans--Biography, Autobiography
Format
Document (PDF)
Naples: The mother city
Title
Naples: The mother city.
Creator
Giannini, Natalia Rita., Florida Atlantic University, Tamburri, Anthony J., Brennan, Teresa
Abstract/Description
Suspended in the corporeality of the baroque, with its emphasis on cycles and simultaneity, rather than linearity, Naples epitomizes the mother space that has been objectified and appropriated by male subjectivity and its alienating rationality, as articulated by the homogenizing discourse of psychoanalysis. This paradigmatic metropolis which actualizes its ancient Greek signification as a "mother-city"---Naples was originally named after the Homeric siren, Parthenope, and associated...
Show moreSuspended in the corporeality of the baroque, with its emphasis on cycles and simultaneity, rather than linearity, Naples epitomizes the mother space that has been objectified and appropriated by male subjectivity and its alienating rationality, as articulated by the homogenizing discourse of psychoanalysis. This paradigmatic metropolis which actualizes its ancient Greek signification as a "mother-city"---Naples was originally named after the Homeric siren, Parthenope, and associated throughout history with various feminine incarnations (the Cumaean sibyl, the Madonna)---asserts a form of reason that transcends the imposition of the Lacanian signification of the phallus and its dichotomizing paradigm of subjectivity. In Anna Maria Ortese's Il mare non bagna Napoli (1953), the phallus is revealed as a void, which subverts not only the "enlightened" knowledge of the phallus, but the debasing obliteration of the feminine as the "unsayable." In Naples, the mother signifies through the negativity, nothingness, and absence emblematic of the womb. Literally "debellied" by the modernizing impetus of a unified Italy after the cholera epidemic of 1884, Parthenope embodies a feminine grotesque aesthetic, as articulated by Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (1992), in which the preeminence of bodily processes effects a critical interruption of Naples's transition to the "Enlightenment." The womb rejects the univocality of the phallus and arguably signifies through nourishment, which, unlike the libido, affirms a subject that emerges out of a counter-paradigmatic continuity with the mother, who can simultaneously be and endow others with being. The mother prevents the subject from imposing an artificial self-sufficiency, as evinced in Jean-Paul Sartre's Spaesamento: Napoli e Capri (2000), where the protagonist debases the maternal nourishment prevalent in Naples in order to empty it of its life-giving power. In turn, by affirming a dialectic that emerges out of the maternal body, Naples bypasses the civilizatory claims of repression and its dualistic mechanization of the psyche in terms of the conscious and the unconscious, and thereby fulfills the all-encompassing realm of the fantastical, which, as in Ortese's Il Monaciello di Napoli (1940), attains its validity through a paradoxically creative and destructive maternal reason that is both a sign of excess and containment.
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Date Issued
2003
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/12024
Subject Headings
Sex symbolism, Naples (Italy)--In literature, Psychoanalysis and literature, Femininity in literature
Format
Document (PDF)