Properties of Writing: Ideological Discourse in Modern Italian Fiction by Robert S. Dombroski (review)

188Rocky Mountain Review their books at all or they use a colored highlighter to mark "seemingly irrelevant " items like dates, names, and "the first sentence of every paragraph regardless of what it says" (58). Dickson reasons that these problems have similar causes; students don't know what to look for because they do not understand "the nature of complex expository prose" (56) and "have limited schemata with which to decipher what they read" (58). Thus reading becomes as critical to the basic writing class as writing; for Dickson, This fact alone changes everything" (25). Dickson's prose is lively and readable; she alternates herselfbetween the distanced and the personal, often presenting concise summaries of theory followed by specific personal practice and experience. Chapter 2, for example , opens with the theoretical background of the Distanced/Personal project : Dickson locates it within MLA and NCTE professional statements about literacy and learning, and she discusses James Moffett and resistance to learning, Jerome Bruner and intrinsic motivation, and Maxine Greene's model of the resilient inquirer. Then she moves into a long account of her own "personal journey" to CEirry out these theories. Dickson's profile of her students and her setting is interesting. Her students are commuters, working-class, rural, place-bound; half are over age twenty-five and eighty-five percent are employed full-time (1-2). And although Dickson teaches at a small, two-year regional campus of the Ohio State University system, many of these features are characteristic of my students at a larger, six-year urban university in the west. Working, placebound learners who may be older are typical of the "new" students and match current national demographics. Perhaps a weakness of It's Not Like That Here is that initially the Distanced/Personal project appears a massive curricular undertaking. Will instructors, often exploited adjuncts or teaching assistants, have the resources to implement it? To her credit, Dickson provides much specific help: sample handouts, exam questions, journal prompts, etc. Perhaps teachers could try pieces of the project and phase it in over time, adapting those strategies that work best. Dickson has created a fine book, both provocative and practical. I recommend it highly. KAREN S. UEHLING Boise State University ROBERT S. DOMBROSKI. Properties of Writing: Ideological Discourse in Modern Italian Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 204 p. Oince almost all of the writers treated in this study are known to Anglophone readers—they range from Manzoni, Verga, D'Annunzio, Pirandello and Svevo to Gadda, Pizzuti, Lampedusa, and Calvino—Robert S. Book Reviews189 Dombroski's critical appraisal of their fiction renders an important service indeed. For the first time he makes available to these very readers what Italian critical reading publics have had the privilege to enjoy for quite a few decades: to view these pillars of modern Italian fiction not only from a literary and historical perspective, but also in terms of their political and ideological dimensions. Ideology and politics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy relate first and foremost to ideas supporting or resisting Italy's unification struggles and its path towards modernization. This path includes its turn towards industrialization, a belated development compared to that of other Western countries, and its concommittantly belated transition from an agricultural society based on semi-feudal social and political structures to a modern society marked by modern forms of governance (parliamentary structures), rationalized forms of material production and reproduction (capitalism, class structures, the nuclear family), as well as by a philosophical , artistic, and literary culture reflecting on the effects of urbanization, modernization, and the rationalization of every day life. In addition, talking about ideology and politics of modern Italy also means looking at Italy as a European nation, intricately connected to the designs of Western competitive industrialism, imperial foreign politics, and political and military hegemony. Since World War II, these designs also include increasing cultural homogenizations, due to the rise and consolidation of a sophisticated multimedia culture organizing and controlling large scale patterns of consumption. That all of the writers assembled in Dombroski's study respond to many of the variables inscribed in the logic of Italy's modernity should come as no surprise. As writers they are public...