The CLIA Fall 2022-2023 is the first Fulbright Lectureship in Italian-American Studies at the University of Calabria following the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Italian American Culture and Literature: Urban Spaces on Screen and the Page
This course examines Italian Americans as represented in literature and film. We will investigate the traditional stereotypes associated with these representations through the history of the Italian diaspora. The course will focus on the emotional and cultural experience of Italian Americans’ attachment to their Italian roots. Students will analyze films, literature, and articles.
Course Description
Robert T. Tally Jr. argues, “In making more visible the possibilities and constraints to literary work through place-based study, a more racially and ethnically approach to the literature survey is made possible.” Using Tally’s point as a springboard, this class studies the cultural, geographical, imaginary, regional, and urban places/spaces in Italian American film and literature formation. However, place is beyond geography; a building, a community, a neighborhood, or a monument can represent space. Thus, the urban environment offers a landscape where people of different social, cultural, and economic groups converge and occupy the same space. Various historical influences construct these places/spaces, but they have also provided their inhabitants with new experiences and cultural expressions.
This course explores a selection of Italian-American films, memoirs, novels, plays, poems, and short stories from the early twentieth century through the present twenty-first century. Many authors and filmmakers characterize place/space as more than a neutral backdrop against which people act. Instead, place/space represents the dynamic relationship between building form and the inhabitants’ perception, imagination, and actions. Secondary critical sources will accompany each primary source. We will examine the role of these literary depictions of Italian Americans in constructing both Italian-American identities and their public perception at large.
Discussion topics will include the contributions of Italian Americans to American culture, their contradictory desire to assimilate into white culture and privilege despite rampant ethnic discriminatory acts/prejudices against them by the same dominant white culture, the role of women in the family, and the forms of conflict and alliance Italian Americans engaged in with other ethnic groups. Students will consider race and ethnicity, national identity, gender identity and relations, and sexual identity. Throughout the course, we will ask how definitions of America and Americans change when we place Italian-American culture and experience not on the margins but at the center of US national identity formation. We will focus on the role of these diverse artists and writers in permanently redefining the nature of American literature in the 20th century and reshaping what American national identity means in a global context.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to complete the following:
identify the significant ideas and developments that have shaped Italian-American cinema/literature;
examine how these ideas and developments have impacted the cultural exchanges between Italy and the US;
evaluate these ideas and movements within their cultural and historical contexts; and
formulate convincing written arguments backed by evidence from primary and secondary sources.
Final Research Paper & Presentation
Each student will prepare a final paper of 13-15 pages. Students can opt to write a traditional academic paper or one that focuses on a family member’s migration (Canada, South America, United States). The creative migration option must include a theoretical angle of vision that discusses some aspect of migration (culture, food, language, religion, etc.). The first draft of your paper is due two weeks before the exam period. You will receive feedback from me to make the necessary edits to your final submission.
