Prospettive italiane. Prosa e critica degli italianisti del Nord America (review)

Significantly, the short stories and scholarly articles in Italian presented in the special issue of Nuova prosa have not been commissioned by an academic periodical but by a monographic literary review that usually collects creative work and scholarly contributions. The special issue's topic is modern Italy as seen from writers and scholars presently living and working in North American universities. As Alessandro Carrera comments in his introduction, medieval and Renaissance studies of American academia have gained significant institutional prestige since the works of Charles Singleton and Hans Baron and are well known in Italy. Modern Italian literature, however, needs to enter a wider intellectual dialogue. The texts that are anthologized here aim precisely at getting the Italian reader acquainted with the scholarly and creative work that is being produced by modern Italian studies in North America.

The four stories belong to two typologies: stories of American visitors to Italy (Reyes and Zimmerman) and retrospective gazes of Italians residents in the United States (Codebò and Valesio). Marc Zimmerman's "I non-invitati" focuses on an American couple's visit to Carapelle Calvisio, the Abruzzi village where the wife's father was born and raised. In a reversal of all popular stereotypes, Italy is cold and rainy. Its people are only occasionally friendly and often out of obligation, remembrances of things past are awkward and uncanny, and the American couple takes leave by initiating a comedy of misdemeanors that ends in sadistic (and, for the Americans, exciting) mind games. A touch of magic realism arrives in Castellammare in Graciela Reyes's "L'impostora," a story about a young woman who poses as her deceased childhood friend while visiting her friend's family in Italy, where she is treated as the real niece. Later, when she realizes that the family is aware that she is not their niece, she continues to pretends she is. This causes the young woman to wonder what she represents to them and vice versa. These questions and doubts, which will always haunt those who live between cultures, are poignantly rendered by Reyes.

Marco Codebò's "Il maestro degli alberi che ballano" (an approximate translation of Stevenson's title "The Master of Ballantrae," attributed to a character who sincerely wished he knew English) is a successful experiment in memorial fiction and deals with a past that is recent enough to be immediately recalled by the reader. This well-crafted minimystery is set in 1960, between Italy, France, and the Americas, and presents a robust linguistic texture ranging between many registers of the Italian language (including appropriate regionalisms) and linguaggi settoriali. The opposite stylistic choice is that of Paolo Valesio's "Lettera dalla vita," an excerpt from a narrative journal in which Italian language is seen as a uniform, memorial filter of the present through the past to which the main character seems to hold on decisively (and probably against his will, as in more than a few excerpts the protagonist, il Magro, is evidently a divided self).

An extended discussion of the relationship between literature and information technology is the focus of Massimo Riva's article, "Nuova prosa e nuove tecnologie: Cronache di un lungo decennio." In combining theoretical exposé and personal experience (from meeting the first experimenters, George Landow and Robert Coover, to installing the Decameron Web), Massimo Riva makes a very clear and important point: the World Wide Web fundamentally changes the approach to the text, which becomes more and more interactive. As a result, the guarantor—the teacher at school—becomes less of a guide and more of a collaborator in an activity that is defined as "una forma di bricolage metodologico" (100). A commendable piece for its thoroughness, Riva's article admittedly omits topics that may be considered crucial, such as the typology of literature on the Web and the role that it acquires. Riva promises further reflections on it, and we hope we will soon read them.

In examining...