Italian Contributions

The topic of America and the Mediterranean as a cradle of culture was both venue and theme of the 16th Biennial Conference of the Italian Association for North American Studies this year. America and the Mediterranean, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo and Pierangelo Castagneto (Torino: Otto Editore), contains more than 50 contributions by Italian scholars. Two other collections of essays are built around a pan-American thematic knot: Donne d'America: Studi in Onore di Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Palermo: Ila Palma), focusing on American women as artists, scholars, or fictional characters; and Culture a contatto nelle Americhe, ed. Michele Bottalico and Rosa Maria Grillo (Salerno-Milan: Oedipus), centered on hybridism as a form of cultural contamination. The Bible and Melville are the topics of two issues of LAmer (21 [2001]; 22 [2002]). The former deals with the sacred book as the instrument with which the American continent was conquered; the latter focuses on the Melvillian space—in Philippe Jaworski's definition—as desert and empire (i.e., a longing for completion and organization). Both volumes stress the exploration of roots, the conflict between man and his fate, and the formulation of the concepts of good and evil. The first volume in a series edited by Andrea Mariani, Riscritture dell'Eden: Il giardino nell'immaginazione letteraria angloamericana (Naples: Liguori), examines the garden as a source of religious, symbolic, mythic, and cultural symbols. In the introductory essay ("Il giardino americano nella foresta dei segni," pp. 3– 26) Mariani surveys the imagery of the garden in the work of mainstream American authors. Italian scholarship on 20th-century literature is unusually rich this year with an entire collection devoted to Thomas Wolfe on the centenary of his birth. A large number of woman-centered papers are reviewed this year, and a new section on theater, cinema, and performance includes scholarship on visual art. Finally, the essays in the second part of America Today, ed. Gigliola Nocera (Siracusa: Grafià), are reviewed in the appropriate sections.

a. General Works, Literature

In "Genoa Gate of the Mediterranean: Nineteenth Century American Writers and Genoa" Rosella Mamoli Zorzi introduces the reader to that perfumed, tasty, and colored world that American travelers approached by sea in the 18th and 19th centuries (America and the Mediterranean, pp. 3–18). After Copley and Jefferson, who were suspicious of moral corruption on the continent, many writers who crossed the ocean could not but respond to the duplicity of the Italian experience, as Mamoli Zorzi argues by recalling the experiences of Hawthorne, Fuller, Jarves, Twain, Cooper, and James. Mario Maffi's "Verticalità e orizzontalità nella cultura newyorkese del primo 900" (pp. 225–32 in Metamorfosi della città: Spazi urbani e forme di vita nella cultura occidentale [Associate]) turns to the other side of the Atlantic to focus on the New York grid as literary and cultural model. Maffi discerns a type of architectural modernism in the metropolis and the upward thrust of its skyscrapers. In particular, he sees Whitman's and Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge as expressing the symbolic tension between the technological steel cords stretched across the water and the traditional soaring, cathedral-like stone buttresses. While the skyscraper may turn into a trap and collapse, Maffi observes, the grid of lines and crossings is the counterpart of the written page, where sequences of signs and symbols displayed horizontally reflect life and continuity.

In Giochi di giochi: Parole e lingua nella letteratura angloamericana (Rome: Nuova Arnica Editrice) Anna Scannavini examines the languages of the United States in their regional, ethnic, and social variants. She also studies their representation in literature with particular reference to such topics as Puerto Rican bilingualism, Cooper's frontier language, Emerson's philosophy of ordinary language, and T. S. Eliot's use of ordinary and conversational vernacular. Using a sociolinguistic approach Scannavini examines code-switching and code-mixing as features of the language spoken and written by Puerto Ricans. She discusses the dialect of the Appalachian region in texts from the 1930s, Black Hawk's autobiography as a product of voice and silence, and Native speech patterns.

Massimo Bacigalupo analyzes the economic motif in "L...