The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film by Barbara Alfano (review)

The Mirage of America in Italian Literature investigates the multiple manifestations of America, as both a real and imaginary space in contemporary Italian writing. As a cultural construction, the author argues, America is functional to the elaboration of an ethics of the subject by contemporary Italian intellectuals who reflect and define their responsibilities as public intellectuals in a global world. These writers discuss America as a way of discussing themselves with different outcomes. America as a cultural construct has always been a vital part of European self-definition, at times in productive ways, as when the historicity of the contacts and travels is recognized and celebrated in the narrative of early migrants; at others, America is a myth, or an Arcadia naturally destined to disappoint the wanderer.

The book covers twenty-five years of Italian cultural production, from 1981 to 2006, and it is organized around five chapters that pair literary and filmic texts according to the use, and sometimes abuse, that the narrative "I" makes of America. The introduction clearly delineates the concepts and theoretical approaches employed in the analysis of the texts: The ethics of the subject, as individual responsibility toward society, subjectivity and its relation to space, and the indispensable background on the figure of the Italian leftist intellectual, who is the protagonist of the first person narratives analyzed in the book. Whereas their leftist affiliation, explains Alfano, mostly consists of shared principles more than a traditional affiliation to a political party, their reflections on themselves and of Italian society through the lens of America is a characteristic of Italian intellectuals, due to the weakness of the Italian national identity.

Chapter 1 traces the reflections of the narrating "I" in Nanni Moretti's film Caro diario and Francesca Duranti's novel Sogni mancini. The conclusion to which both texts arrive is that there is no more "new land" or America as mythical land. In Caro diario, America is only a part of the world Moretti rejects—the Italian world inherited from the sixties, loudly crashed in the early 1990s with Tangentopoli, and soon to be dominated by Italian communication tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. The narrator of Duranti's Sogni mancini considers America as only one side of her identity, claiming the possibility of "living between two worlds." Error and confusion derived by an idea of America that overflows from its national boundaries is the trait d'union of the three works read in Chapter 2, titled "America Ubiqua." Here Alfano discusses Troisi's and Benigni's film Non ci resta che piangere, Baricco's novel City, and Amelio's Lamerica. America, as cultural construction, does not offer "solutions for problems of global ethics," yet, ironically, these texts function on ideas of America as a cultural and economic icon. Chapter 3, "On a Trip to America: The "I" Travels," Andrea De Carlo's Treno di panna is analyzed alongside Jacques Baudrillard's Amérique, whose idea of America as a counterpoint to Europe is employed by De Carlo. Treno di panna, published in 1981, soon after the end of the "years of lead," is characterized by a lack of self-irony that allows the author to criticize and reject the shallow world of Hollywood, which the protagonist navigates unable to move beyond the stereotypes about America typical of his European formation. The protagonist's lack of awareness of such preconceived ideas of America hinders his self-discovery, and his wondering fails to be in any way transformative.

Yet questioning such preconceived notions does not equate self-transformation, as it is evident in Gina Lagorio's L'arcadia Americana, the focus of Chapter 4. The narrator, a photographer who is working on a reportage on American universities, is unable to see them as part of the larger society, thus envisioning them as an artificial reality. This "death in Arcadia," the trope explained in Chapter 4, is an appropriate segue into the last chapter titled, "Historicizing the Dream...