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Andrijka Kwasny Ethnic Occupations (on Marianna de Marco Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994]; and Frank Lentricchia, The Edge of Night: A Confession [New York: Random House, 1994]) [A] character really has its own life, marked with his own characteristics, by virtue of which he always is someone. Whereas a man ... a man can be no one. —Pirandello Autobiographies are invariably narratives of climbs, of struggles overcome in the inevitable ascent, deliberate or accidental, to some higher state:—be it wealth, fame, "inner peace," self-consciousness, or an Olympic gold medal. And it's no surprise that as academic autobiographies , Marianna de Marco Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter and Frank Lentricchia's The Edge ofNight: A Confession, are more or less narratives of class climbing . Their class climbs, however, are also so heavily accented with the prescriptions and expectations of their ethnic Italian families that the climb out oftheir working class backgrounds is simultaneously a climb out of their ethnicity. It is precisely in terms of this double climb that they construct their present identities as university professors. Ethnicity, even more so than class, functions to provide the requisite "character" for the transformation from "no one" into "someone" which warrants the genre in the first place. Insofar as Lentricchia uses the above quotation of Pirandello as the opening epigraph for his autobiography, it is the achievement of such substance and presence upon which both autobiographies are built. Torgovnick and Lentricchia read themselves as their own characters struggling amidst the dissonance of their ethnic and academic accents. These autobiographies thus negotiate between the past and the present, the working class parents and the salaried Duke professors, the ethnic and the academic , the personal and the professional. Torgovnick organizes her book in such a way to make clear and distinct those positions of character and reader. Part One, "Crossing Ocean Parkway," comprised of four essays written explicitly in the genre of memoir, establishes Torgovnick as a character in terms of an 228 the minnesota review ethnic and gendered identity. The first essay, "On Being White, Female , and Born in Bensonhurst," counters representations of the Italian American community in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn that flooded the media following the racially motivated murder of Yusef Hawkins in 1989. However, Torgovnick's Bensonhurst is not a place of power or privilege for its daughters, despite their apparent talents or competencies . She describes her struggles for legitimacy within her family and her culture, effectively though rebelliously propelling her to "cross" Ocean Parkway to the neighboring Jewish community where she finds support, companionship, intellectual stimulation, and love. But, as Torgovnick describes in the remaining chapters of this section, even the potent combination of love and logic is not enough to combat the internalized vulnerabilities resulting from a girlhood circumscribed by ethnic, cultural, and gendered definitions. "Slasher Stories " and "The College Way" depict contemporaneous collisions in Torgovnick's personal Ufe: the death of her first child, the maladjustment as an assistant professor at a small, elite New England college, and her subsequent tenure denial. These chapters work to support Torgovnick's claim to her own "otherness" in both American society and academia. What defines Torgovnick as a character, then, is precisely this otherness conditioned by her being an Italian American daughter. Thus, Torgovnick uses her ethnicity along with its gender prescriptions to make a larger claim to marginality, though it is not unqualified: Being ethnic has given me sensitive antennae for feeling out of it or excluded ; but so has being female, a category often denigrated by Italian Americans. I have a strong attraction to powerful (largely male), upperand upper-middle-class American culture. I want to feel privileged and entitled. At the same time, I identify, I like to identify, with outsiders, (x) Aware of the contradictions between the characterizations of herself as an other and as an institutionally embraced tenured professor at Duke University, and further aware that these contradictions can't be sustained lest they make her look disingenuous or naive or opportunistic , she complicates her voice in Part Two. In "Readings by an Italian American Daughter," Torgovnick attempts to resolve...

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