Italian Signs American Streets

Author : Fred L. Gardaphé
Publisher : New Americanists
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Italian Signs, American Streets written by Fred L. Gardaphé and published by New Americanists. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective--variously historical, philosophical, and cultural--by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention. Gardaphé draws on Vico's concept of history, as well as the work of Gramsci, to establish a culture-specific approach to reading Italian American literature. He begins his historical reading with narratives informed by oral traditions, primarily autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by immigrants. From these earliest social-realist narratives, Gardaphé traces the evolution of this literature through tales of "the godfather" and the mafia; the "reinvention of ethnicity" in works by Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso; the move beyond ethnicity in fiction by Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino; to the short fiction of Mary Caponegro, which points to a new direction in Italian American writing. The result is both an ethnography of Italian American narrative and a model for reading the signs that mark the "self-fashioning" inherent in literary and cultural production. Italian Signs, American Streets promises to become a landmark in the understanding of literature and culture produced by Italian Americans. It will be of interest not only to students, critics, and scholars of this ethnic experience, but also to those concerned with American literature in general and the place of immigrant and ethnic literatures within that wide framework.

Author : Fred L. Gardaphé
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791485978
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Leaving Little Italy written by Fred L. Gardaphé and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leaving Little Italy explores the various forces that have shaped and continue to mold Italian American culture. Early chapters offer a historical survey of major developments in Italian American culture, from the early mass immigration period to the present day, situating these developments within the larger framework of American culture as a whole. Subsequent chapters examine particular works of Italian American literature and film from a variety of perspectives, including literary history, gender, social class, autobiography, and race. Paying particular attention to how the individual artist's personality has intersected with community in the shaping of Italian American culture, the book reveals how and why Italian America was invented and why Little Italys must ultimately disappear.

Author : June Skinner Sawyers
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 9780142003541
Total Pages : 472 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Racing in the Street written by June Skinner Sawyers and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-04-06 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than three decades, Bruce Springsteen’s ability to express in words and music the deepest hopes, fears, loves, and sorrows of average Americans has made him a hero to his millions of devoted fans. Racing in the Street is the first comprehensive collection of writings about Springsteen, featuring the most insightful, revealing, famous, and infamous articles, interviews, reviews, and other writings. This nostalgic journey through the career of a rock-’n’-roll legend chronicles every album and each stage of Springsteen’s career. It’s all here—Dave Marsh’s Rolling Stone review of Springsteen’s ten sold-out Bottom Line shows in 1975 in New York City, Jay Cocks’s and Maureen Orth’s dueling Time and Newsweek cover stories, George Will’s gross misinterpretation of Springsteen’s message on his Born in the USA tour, and Will Percy’s 1999 interview for Double Take, plus much, much more.

Author : Pellegrino A D'Acierno
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000525554
Total Pages : 542 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Italian American Heritage written by Pellegrino A D'Acierno and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-12 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Joseph Sciorra
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823232654
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Italian Folk written by Joseph Sciorra and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are everyday cultural entities long associated with Italian Americans, yet the general perception of them remains superficial and stereotypical at best. For many people, these scenarios trigger ingrained assumptions about individuals' beliefs, politics, aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance and elaboration. This collection of essays explores local knowledge and aesthetic practices, often marked as "folklore," as sources for creativity and meaning in Italian-American lives. As the contributors demonstrate, folklore provides contemporary scholars with occasions for observing and interpreting behaviors and objects as part of lived experiences. Its study provides new ways of understanding how individuals and groups reproduce and contest identities and ideologies through expressive means. Italian Folk offers an opportunity to reexamine and rethink what we know about Italian Americans. The contributors to this unique book discuss historic and contemporary cultural expressions and religious practices from various parts of the United States and Canada to examine how they operate at local, national, and transnational levels. The essays attest to people's ability and willingness to create and reproduce certain cultural modes that connect them to social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in large-scale festivals and now on the Internet. Italian Americans abandon, reproduce, and/or revive various cultural elements in relationship to ever-shifting political, economic, and social conditions. The results are dynamic, hybrid cultural forms such as valtaro accordion music, Sicilian oral poetry, a Columbus Day parade, and witchcraft (stregheria). By taking a closer look and an ethnographic approach to expressive behavior, we see that Italian-American identity is far from being a linear path of assimilation from Italian immigrant to American of Italian descent but is instead fraught with conflict, negotiation, and creative solutions. Together, these essays illustrate how folklore is evoked in the continual process of identity revaluation and reformation.

Author : Robert Viscusi
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791482421
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing written by Robert Viscusi and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 Pietro Di Donato and John Fante Literary Award from The Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy, New York State Robert Viscusi takes a comprehensive look at Italian American writing by exploring the connections between language and culture in Italian American experience and major literary texts. Italian immigrants, Viscusi argues, considered even their English to be a dialect of Italian, and therefore attempted to create an American English fully reflective of their historical, social, and cultural positions. This approach allows us to see Italian American purposes as profoundly situated in relation not only to American language and culture but also to Italian nationalist narratives in literary history as well as linguistic practice. Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the "eccentric design" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts.

Author : Salvatore J. LaGumina
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135583331
Total Pages : 733 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Italian American Experience written by Salvatore J. LaGumina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author : Garibaldi Lapolla
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813548470
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Grand Gennaro written by Garibaldi Lapolla and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-09 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illiterate Calabrian in southern Italy owes money to his church and mayor. He skips town for the bustling streets of New York. Meeting an old friend, a fellow immigrant, he thanks him for help getting settled, and then steals his money. With a new parcel of wealth, he materializes from a small-time laborer into a big-time entrepreneur, soon becoming the tyrant of the local Italian American community. By pluck, luck, and unscrupulous business practices, this cunning character "makes America." There are riches, pleasure, and the beautiful Carmela. Then trouble. Comeuppance. Ambush. Revenge.Twenty-first century popular culture? Not at all. The Grand Gennaro, a riveting saga set at the turn of the last century in Italian American Harlem, reflects on how youthful acts of cruelty and desperation follow many to the grave. A classic in the truest sense, this operatic narrative is alive once again, addressing the question: How does one become an "American"?

Author : Robert Casillo
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 080209113X
Total Pages : 641 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Gangster Priest written by Robert Casillo and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive. Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various facets of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists. Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian American films offer what Casillo views as a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Italian America and Southern Italy, the conflicts between the ethnic generations, and the formation and development of Italian American ethnicity (and thus identity) on American soil through the generations. Raised as a Catholic and deeply imbued with Catholic values, Scorsese also deals with certain forms of Southern Italian vernacular religion, which have left their imprint not only on Scorsese himself but also on the spiritually tormented characters of his Italian American films. Casillo also shows how Scorsese interrogates the Southern Italian code of masculine honour in his exploration of the Italian American underworld or Mafia, and through his implicitly Catholic optic, discloses its thoroughgoing and longstanding opposition to Christianity. Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.

Author : Meyer
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004656502
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Literature and Ethnic Discrimination written by Meyer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though universities and colleges make a concerted effort to foster unity and worldwide acceptance of different ethnicities by including politically correct literature in their curriculums, their attempts to protect students from being exposed to texts that portray discrimination and exhibit racial insensitivity are futile and ill-advised. Texts that contain biases based on otherness continue to be written and those produced in the past remain relevant and still demand the attention of an audience of reader. In order to see the full picture of the world in which they live, students must face even that which is uncomfortable and disturbing. To think otherwise is to create and academic environment that is totally idealistic and distorts the fact that ethnic discrimination has been a potent reality in every society in history and remains so today. These studies in this volume allow readers to meet writers from the traditional American and European canon while also being exposed to third world writers whose work may be unfamiliar. They include memoirs of Holocaust survivors and even record the silencing of Italian women, Apartheid in South Africa and tribal conflict in Nigeria as well as transplanted Asian culture in Canada and the idolization of the black body in Japan. The collection permits a viewing of the ethnic 'other' not merely in a politically correct way in which one samples the differences and nods approvingly. Rather its intent is to offer opportunities for contemplative assessment of authorial motives and goals, thereby engendering a wealth of understanding based on active engagement rather than passive acceptance of the status quo.