Download or read book Italian American Writers on New Jersey written by Jennifer Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Writing With An Accent written by Edvige Giunta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Cappello, Louise DeSalvo, Sandra M. Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Carole Maso, Agnes Rossi. These are some of the best-known Italian American writers today. They are part of a literary tradition with mid-twentieth century roots that began to develop, in earnest, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During those decades, a number of Italian American women, such as Helen Barolini, began to publish books that depicted their perspectives on life through the critical lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. At the end of the twentieth century, this literature finally blossomed into a fully fledged cultural movement that also took into account issues of sexuality, age, illness, and familial and societal abuse. Writing with an Accent takes a look at this vibrant literary movement by discussing those first writers of the 1970s and 1980s as well as later authors. At the center of Edvige Giunta s Writing with an Accent is the literal notion of accent, the marker of linguistic and cultural difference that separates and identifies recent immigrants to the United States. In this study, an accent symbolically embodies the differences and creative strategies through which contemporary Italian American women writers engage Italian American culture in works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Giunta also looks at the links between the literature and art, music, film, and video produced by contemporary Italian American women. The literature of the Italian American women in Writing with an Accent is shaped by the complicated connections these authors maintain with their cultural origins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by their feminist consciousness and politicized sense of ethnic identity. Writing with an Accent celebrates and explores a group of authors who characteristically mix the joy and pain of Italian American life to paint a multifaceted picture of Italian American women and their complex place in U.S. culture.
Download or read book The Milk of Almonds written by Louise A. DeSalvo and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2003-08 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often sentimentalized as nurturing through food, Italian American women have continually struggled against this stereotype to speak of the realities of their lives. In The Milk of Almonds, more than 50 writers speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively comical. Drawing on personal and cultural memory rooted in experiences of food, here Italian American women dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir. Though they begin with food, the writers in this collection quickly carry the reader into unexpected terrain as they bear witness to experiences often considered unspeakable. A deeply satisfying literary banquet, The Milk of Almonds is an unprecedented collection, amply revising all received notions of what it means to be an Italian American woman. Book jacket.
Download or read book Teaching Italian American Literature Film and Popular Culture written by Edvige Giunta and published by Modern Language Association of America. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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.
Download or read book Guido written by Letizia Airos and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. This book includes essays on the phenomenon of the "guido": its origins and its relationship to the Italian/American community. The writers share their own views on a phenomenon that, in December 2009/January 2010, was filling newspapers and television programs, in reaction to the then new reality show Jersey Shore. The community's "dirty laundry" was finally aired in public, without maintaining the convention of bella figura, as a modern and pluralistic community does and should do.
Download or read book Italian Americans written by Eric Martone and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-12-12 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The entire Italian American experience—from America's earliest days through the present—is now available in a single volume. This wide-ranging work relates the entire saga of the Italian-American experience from immigration through assimilation to achievement. The book highlights the enormous contributions that Italian Americans—the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States—have made to the professions, politics, academy, arts, and popular culture of America. Going beyond familiar names and stories, it also captures the essence of everyday life for Italian Americans as they established communities and interacted with other ethnic groups. In this single volume, readers will be able to explore why Italians came to America, where they settled, and how their distinctive identity was formed. A diverse array of entries that highlight the breadth of this experience, as well as the multitude of ways in which Italian Americans have influenced U.S. history and culture, are presented in five thematic sections. Featured primary documents range from a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus announcing his discovery to excerpts from President Barack Obama's 2011 speech to the National Italian American Foundation. Readers will come away from this book with a broader understanding of and greater appreciation for Italian Americans' contributions to the United States.
Download or read book From the Margin written by Anthony Julian Tamburri and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology, hailed as a significant contribution to American ethnic studies, features the short stories, poems, and plays of more than thirty Italian American artists. Drawing on their individual and collective backgrounds and experience, these writers convey another vision of American fife. A section of critical essays by established scholars in the field, with topics ranging from specific works and authors to broad literary movements and film studies, analyzes the Italian American phenomenon and the role of ethnicity in literature. The extensive bibliography treats creative works, critical essays, and films dealing with the Italian American experience and promises to be an invaluable research tool.
Download or read book Embroidered Stories written by Edvige Giunta and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants.
Download or read book Amore written by Mark Rotella and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells of the story of how Italians integrated into America in the 1950s in part through the music of such singers as Enrico Caruso, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, and others.
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.
Download or read book Crazy in the Kitchen written by Louise DeSalvo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During Louise DeSalvo's childhood in 1950s New Jersey, the kitchen becomes the site for fierce generational battle. Louise's step-grandmother insists on recreating the domestic habits of her Southern Italian peasant upbringing, clashing with Louise's convenience-food-loving mother; Louise, meanwhile, dreams of cooking perfect fresh pasta in her own kitchen. But as Louise grows up to indulge in amazing food and travels to Italy herself, she arrives at a fuller and more compassionate picture of her own roots. And, in the process, she reveals that our image of the bounteous Italian American kitchen may exist in part to mask a sometimes painful history. Louise DeSalvo is a writer, professor, lecturer, and scholar who lives in New Jersey. Her many books include the memoirs Vertigo, Breathless, and Adultery; the acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work; and Writing as a Way of Healing. Recently, she edited Woolf's early novel Melymbrosia and coedited The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. A Book Sense 76 pick in hardcover "Louise DeSalvo packs about six courses of emotional wallop into her slim memoir...[A] tough, courageous story, one of hard-won wisdom and memory."-San Francisco Chronicle "Illuminate[s] the difficulties of reconciling past and present...DeSalvo celebrates the table of her ancestors by savoring her own rediscovered history."-New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Italian America written by Margherita Ganeri and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2015-09-17T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers to the reader a tool to address the still largely uncharted territory of contemporary literature of migration. In addition to presenting and commenting on the production of the prolific writer Helen Barolini, the author Margherita Ganeri has a further ambition: to investigate the question that runs through the debate on the relationship between literary writing and socio-cultural groups, namely the possibility to define literature, and in particular Italian American literature, on the basis of ethnicity. The book includes a preface by Melania G. Mazzucco and an exclusive excerpt of Helen Barolini’s forthcoming Visits.
Download or read book American Woman Italian Style written by Carol Bonomo Albright and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With writings that span more than thirty-five years, American Woman, Italian Style is a rich collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States is noteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population--so too does their educational attainment and income. Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a selfconscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee. Readers will find challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research. American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women offers unique insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collection brings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences. It is an impressive postmodern collection for interdisciplinary studies: a book and a look about being and becoming an American.
Download or read book Some Kind of Wise Guy written by Bill Ervolino and published by Record Books (NJ). This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
Download or read book Breaking Open written by Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-31 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, prominent Italian American creative women discuss the ways their heritage has impacted their works. They discuss the ways that their childhood memories of immigrants and their practices have been a strong foundation for their creativity.
