Italian Contributions

Italian scholarship this year confirms its tendency of favoring thematic and methodological debates among scholars on seminal issues concerning American literature and culture. Numerous national and international conferences and seminars have taken place to propose new instances of investigation or to contribute to the development of projects already initiated. Essay collections, as a consequence, proliferated, and featured an increasing number of contributions from scholars from various scientific areas and different countries, their work adding to the multidisciplinary and international purport of contemporary research.

a. Collections and Essays

This year's issue of RSA Journal (19) is dedicated to the theme debated during the 2007 interdisciplinary seminar held at the Centro Studi Americani in Rome, which went under the challenging title "Pursuits of Happiness." Guest editor Donatella Izzo's scholarly introduction to the first section, "Pursuits of Happiness: A Tentative Map" (pp. 5-19), discusses the historical significance, philosophical implications, and political reasons underlying the statement in the Declaration of Independence that the "pursuit of happiness" is an inalienable right of all men. Izzo first considers the enduring question of whether the notion of happiness is associated with passive experiences or whether instead it can be gained through virtuous pursuit. In illustrating the complexity of the matter as it has been faced by Western thinkers (Aristotle, St. Augustine, John Locke, Michel Foucault, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King are among the many cited), she focuses her attention on the ideological implications of the question, leading the debate to the crucial issue of establishing the relationship between individual well-being and public policies and between immaterial and material satisfaction. There follow essays by Liam Kennedy ("American Studies Without Tears," pp. 20-33) and Robyn Wiegman ("Outside American Studies: On the Unhappy Pursuits of Non-Complicity," pp. 35-78), both engaging the question of the internationalization of American studies by way of its affective implications. Giuseppe Nori provides a perceptive introduction to the second section of the issue, which is dedicated to a forum celebrating Sacvan Bercovitch. Eminent scholars from the international academic community contribute essays on Bercovitch's methodology and theoretical views. Among them are Werner Sollors's "The Next Turn in American Literary and Cultural Studies" (pp. 83-85), Jonathan Arac's "Fragments of Bercovitch's America" (pp. 86-88), Nancy Bentley's "Disenchantment, Ideology, Aesthetics: The Work of Sacvan Bercovitch" (pp. 88-90), Emily Budick's "Saki and Me: The Making of an Americanist" (pp. 90-93), Emory Elliott's "Essential Bercovitch" (pp. 93-94), Nan Goodman's "Border Lives: A Reading of Sacvan Bercovitch and Roger Williams" (pp. 95-97), Mary Louise Kete's "What's Funny about Sacvan Bercovitch?" (pp. 97-100), Michael P. Kramer's "Up from Assent: Sacvan Bercovitch and the Theory of Assimilation" (pp. 101-06), Cyrus R. K. Patell's "Sacvan Bercovitch and Cosmopolitan Conversation" (pp. 106-10), Anita Patterson's "Bercovitch and Pedagogy: The Virtues of Historicism" (pp. 111-13), and Donald Pease's "Echoes of Bercovitch in the Obama Inaugural" (pp. 113-20). In keeping with the general theme of this issue of RSA, a third section contains articles by Italian Americanists. Giorgio Mariani contributes "'Chief Seattle' versus Sherman Alexie: How Useful Is Ecocriticism When We Read American Indian Literature?" (pp. 123-33). Mariani juxtaposes Rudolf Keiser's mythical representation of Chief Seattle as "the prophet of an ecological sentiment" to Alexie's polemical response to the literary tradition confining the image of the Indian to a romanticized stereotype. Mariani analyzes different examples of writers and critics who have dealt with the question of the Indians' relationship with the environment, concluding that "the question of what may be the distinctive contribution of an ecocritical Indian literature to the functioning of American Indian sovereignty remains unsettled." In "The Reception of Cooper's The Bravo" (pp. 134-50) Anna Scannavini discusses James Fenimore Cooper's novel by juxtaposing the different reactions it received from contemporary critics. On the one side were the Venetian intellectuals who criticized Cooper for writing about the customs of the Venetian Republic with scanty knowledge of its history, and on the other was "Cassio," the anonymous writer who penned...