Italian American Poetics of Place

Italian American Poetics of Place
Author: Sabrina Vellucci
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2024-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1683934334

This volume examines the significance of place in contemporary Italian American literature from an ecocritical perspective. It fills a gap in the theoretical discourse on Italian American culture, whose concerns about environmental justice have been mostly overlooked. From mid-twentieth-century poets such as John Ciardi and Diane di Prima to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction writers such as Carole Maso and Salvatore Scibona, the study combines Italian American literary criticism with the spatial turn that, over the last decades, has asserted the interpretive significance of place and the environment in literary texts. Questioning the prejudice that sees Italian American culture as detached from ecological issues, these works show that such diasporic heritage has helped forge different modes of relationship and new forms of expression in contact with the “American” land. Their relevance lies not so much in defining or redefining Italian American ethnicity but in forging ideas and futures beyond their immediate framework and subject matter. By focusing on the intersection of gender and ethnicity with local and transnational spaces and aesthetic practices, Italian American Poetics of Place contributes to the growing field of inquiry that explores the resources of the literary in laying the basis for more dialogic and inclusive forms of awareness and community with both the human and other-than-human.

Italian American Writers on New Jersey

Italian American Writers on New Jersey
Author: Jennifer Gillan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780813533179

This anthology gathers fiction, poetry, memoirs, oral histories, and journalistic pieces by some of the best writers to chronicle the Italian American experience in the Garden State. These works focus on ethnic identity and the distinctive culture of New Jersey, which has long been home to a large and vital Italian American community. Filled with passion, humor, and grace, these writings depict a variety of experiences, including poignant but failed attempts at conformity and the alienation often felt by ethnic Americans. The authors also speak of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities and the realization that it is often the appreciation of their heritage that helps them to succeed. Although presented from the vantage point of only one ethnic group, this book addresses in microcosm the complexities of American identity, depicting situations and conveying emotions that will resonate with people of all immigrant ancestries. Among the many writers featured are Gay Talese, Bill Ervolino, Tom Perrotta, Louise DeSalvo, Carole Mazo, Diane di Prima, and Maria Laurino. Each of the contributors provides a fresh perspective on the diversity, complexity, and richness of the Italian American experience. Publication of this book is made possible in part by a grant from the Institute of Italian and Italian American Heritage Studies, State of New Jersey.

New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry

New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry
Author: Dennis Barone
Publisher: Star Cloud Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781932842524

New Hungers for Old is a remarkable achievement. Individually evocative and collectively superb, the poems illuminate an immense variety of Italian American voices and experiences. Yet they also extend well beyond the scope of a single ethnic category. This is that rare, thoughtful anthology for all readers wishing to reflect on the treasures and tragedies of the universal human condition.Chandra Prasad, author of On Borrowed Wings: A Novel end editor of Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial ExperienceDennis Barone has produced a book of great beauty and importance that should be read by anyone who cares about American as well as Italian American writing. It offers a cornucopia of remarkable poems by generations of Italian American poets whose work mirrors the evolution of American forms from realism through postmodernism. Including famous and emerging younger talents, New Hungers for Old underscores a distinctive intersection of heritage and the larger culture in the flavor of its innovations. The dazzling variety of poems share an infatuation with life itself - the gifts and pleasures it bestows, the harsh toll it exacts, the rebellions it provokes and the revelations of spirit that erupt from felt experience. It is a landmark collection that is essential reading.Josephine G. Hendin, Professor of English and Tiro A Segno Professor of Italian American Studies, New York University

Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
Author: Edvige Giunta
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781603290661

Italian American studies has long been in conversation with American culture at large and is increasingly present in American universities and colleges. Yet once-celebrated works, such as Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete, have slipped from the public consciousness, and many scholars fear that representations of Italian Americans in popular culture, as in The Godfather films and the television series The Sopranos, have obscured genuine historical inquiry and understanding. This volume aims to foster a deeper and more complex appreciation for the importance of Italian American texts in the study of American culture.The editors open the volume by outlining the history of Italians in the United States and exploring the potential of literature and the arts to enable the recovery of a forgotten, even repressed, historical past. Over thirty scholars and teachers then present innovative ways of teaching Italian American texts and integrating them with other texts in courses ranging from American literature and history to multiethnic and women's studies. Contributors discuss Italian American fiction, poetry, memoir, oral history, and theater and performance. A section on film and television provides an overview of popular as well as lesser-known works and interrogates the stereotyped portrayals of Italian Americans. Other contributors offer historical and interdisciplinary approaches to Italian American texts that revolve around themes of race and gender politics, work and social class, and historical intersections. The volume concludes with a review of anthologies that can be used in teaching Italian American studies.

Contemporary Italian Women Poets

Contemporary Italian Women Poets
Author: Cinzia Sartini Blum
Publisher: Italica Pr
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2001-06-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780934977173

Contemporary Italian Women Poets introduces English-reading audiences to the diversity of contemporary women's poetry in Italy during the past five decades. It includes twenty-five authors whose work has been published since World War II: poets from different generations and regions, some with international acclaim, others known primarily to those within women's literary circles. THE POETS who appear are: Mariella Bettarini, Cristina Campo, Anna Cascella, Patrizia Cavalli, Elena Clementelli, Rosita Copioli,Biancamaria Frabotta, Luciana Frezza, Vera Gherarducci, Margherita Guidacci, Armanda Guiducci, Jolanda Insana, Vivian Lamarque, Gabriella Leto, Dacia Maraini, Daria Menicanti, Alda Merini, Giulia Niccolai, Luciana Notari, Rossana Ombres, Piera Oppezzo, Amelia Rosselli, Gabriella Sica, Maria Luisa Spaziani and Patrizia Valduga. DUAL-LANGUAGE POETRY. Introduction, notes on the poets, bibliography index of first lines.

Wild Dreams

Wild Dreams
Author: Carol Bonomo Albright
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2009-08-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0823229122

For more than thirty years, the journal Italian Americana has been home to the writers who have sparked an extraordinary literary explosion in Italian-American culture. Across twenty-five volumes, its poets, memoirists, story-tellers, and other voices bridged generations to forge a brilliant body of expressive works that help define an Italian-American imagination. Wild Dreams offers the very best from those pages: sixty-three pieces—fiction, memoir, poetry, story, and interview—that range widely in style and sentiment, tracing the arc of an immigrant culture’s coming of age in America. What stories do Italian Americans tell about themselves? How do some of America’s best writers deal with complicated questions of identity in their art? Organized by provocative themes—Ancestors, The Sacred and the Profane, Love and Anger, Birth and Death, Art and Self—the selections document the evolution of Italian-American literature. From John Fante’s “My Father’s God,” his classic story of religious subversion and memoirs by Dennis Barone and Jerre Mangione to a brace of poets, selected by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma, ranging from John Ciardi, Jay Parini, and Mary Jo Salter to George Guida and Rachel Guido de Vries. There are also stories alive with the Italian folk tradition (Tony Ardizzone and Louisa Ermelino), and others sleekly experimental (Mary Caponegro, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson). Other pieces—including an unforgettable interview with Camille Paglia—are Italian-American takes on the culture at large.

When the Stars Were Still Visible

When the Stars Were Still Visible
Author: Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2021-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781622889136

Mari Mazziotti Gillan's new book, When the Stars were Still Visible, asks us to "remember." In her example, memories start "on the back steps of the six-family tenement / on 5th Avenue in Paterson" in 1944, her father dressed "as a devil for a costume party / at the Società Cilentana"; this opens "so many memories" which "swirl / like bits of color in a kaleidoscope": of Mrs Gianelli "who always fainted when she got upset" and of "Zio Guillermo's garden / with tomatoes and zucchini and corn" which is "years later / covered with asphalt and garages." The poet tells us that "children of immigrants pick up bits and pieces / over the years to create a picture" ("The Children of Immigrants"), that "On the street where I grew up / everyone knew everyone else. / We knew each other's secrets" ("Carrying Their Hometowns to Paterson"), and, invoking Eliot, that they wore faces that they presented to the world. She writes about her people, her community, and the comfort of soothing things "beckoning me home" ("Even After All These Years"), the way, perhaps, that all poetry should.

The Italian American Heritage

The Italian American Heritage
Author: Pellegrino A D'Acierno
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 542
Release: 2021-12-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000525554

First published in 1999. The many available scholarly works on Italian-Americans are perhaps of little practical help to the undergraduate or high school student who needs background information when reading contemporary fiction with Italian characters, watching films that require a familiarity with Italian Americans, or looking at works of art that can be fully appreciated only if one understands Italian culture. This basic reference work for non-specialists and students offers quick insights and essential, easy-to-grasp information on Italian-American contributions to American art, music, literature, motion pictures and cultural life. This rich legacy is examined in a collection of original essays that include portrayals of Italian characters in the films of Francis Coppola, Italian American poetry, the art of Frank Stella, the music of Frank Zappa, a survey of Italian folk customs and an analysis of the evolution of Italian-American biography. Comprising 22 lengthy essays written specifically for this volume, the book identifies what is uniquely Italian in American life and examines how Italian customs, traditions, social mores and cultural antecedents have wrought their influence on the American character. Filled with insights, observations and ethnic facts and fictions, this volume should prove to be a valuable source of information for scholars, researchers and students interested in pinpointing and examining the cultural, intellectual and social influence of Italian immigrants and their successors.

Poets of the Italian Diaspora

Poets of the Italian Diaspora
Author: Luigi Bonaffini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1532
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780823232536

In the century between 1870 and 1970, about twenty-seven million migrants left Italy to work and live abroad. As a result, the worldwide Italian diaspora reportedly numbers more than sixty million people. Until now, however, there has not been an anthology devoted to the literature of the Italian diaspora that places it in a global context. This landmark volume presents a truly international selection of works by more than seventy Italian-language poets who are writing in countries from Australia to Venezuela. Their poetry is collected here into eleven geographical regions. The history and current state of Italian-language poetry in each region receives a critical overview by a knowledgeable scholar, who also introduces each poet and provides a bibliography of his or her work. All poems appear on facing pages in both Italian and English. Poets of the Italian Diaspora is part of a long-range project, by the editors and contributors, to expand the boundaries of the Italian literary canon.

Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos

Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos
Author: Massimo Bacigalupo
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2020-03-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1949979016

Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Italy and wrote about it incessantly in his poetry. Only by following his footsteps, acquaintances and composition processes can we make sense of and enjoy his forbidding Cantos. This study provides for the first time an account of Pound’s Italian wanderings and of what they became in his work. After this study we will be able to read Pound as a guide to the places, people and books he loved, and we will share his the poet traveler’s joys and discoveries.