By the Breath of Their Mouths

Mary Jo Bona

Description

In By the Breath of Their Mouths, Mary Jo Bona examines the oral uses of language and the liberating power of speech in Italian American writing, as well as its influences on generations of assimilated Italian American writers. Probing and wide-ranging, Bona's analysis reveals the lasting importance of storytelling and folk narrative, their impact on ethnic, working-class, and women's literatures, and their importance in shaping multiethnic literature. Drawing on a wide range of material from several genres, including oral biographies, fiction, film, poetry, and memoir, and grounded in recent theories of narrative and autobiography, postcolonial theory, and critical multiculturalism, By the Breath of Their Mouths is must reading for students in Italian American studies in particular and ethnic studies and multiethnic literature more generally.
Acknowledgments
Introduction 

1. Justice/Giustizia—Private Justice and the Folkloric Community in the World of Italian Americans

2. Faith/Fede—Plenty to Confess: Women and (Italian) American Catholicism

3. Story/Racconto—Una chiacchierata nel passato: Rosa and Marie of Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant

4. Land/Terra—Village People in Guido D’Agostino’s Novels

5. History Singer/Cantastorie—Vernacular Voices in Paule Marshall’s and Tina De Rosa’s Kunstlerromane

6. Precursor/Precursore—Mother’s Tongue: Italian American Daughters and Female Precursors

7. Death/Morte—What They Talk About When They Talk About Death

8. Revival/Risorgimento—Stories Continue: Shaping U.S. Italian American Writing

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438429977
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series in Italian/American Culture
Fred L. Gardaphe, editor

By the Breath of Their Mouths
N ARRATIVES OF R ESISTANCE IN I TALIAN A MERICA

Mary Jo Bona

Cover art: “Basement Reverie” painting by Christine Perri. Textured woodgrain background © Selahattin Bayram/ iStockphoto.com
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bona, Mary Jo.
  By the breath of their mouths : narratives of resistance in Italian America / Mary Jo Bona.
           p. cm.—(Suny Press series in Italian/American culture)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 978-1-4384-2995-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)—
    ISBN 978-1-4384-2996-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
   1. American literature—Italian American authors—History and criticism. 2. Italian Americans in literature. 3. Italian Americans—Intellectual life. I. Title.
    PS153.I8B65 2010
    810.9'851—dc22                                                                                     2009017905
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of my beloved mother and twin brother

By the word of Yahweh the heavens were made,
Their whole array by the breath of his mouth.
—Psalms 33:6

Acknowledgments

In the mid-1980s when I began my foray into the literature of Italian America, it felt like walking into the barren spaces of the great Northwest, despite the fact that most of the narratives were urban-centered, cluttered, and noisy. Yet, as Gretel Ehrlich has so eloquently written of the solace of open spaces, I felt a peaceful coming-home among works that were largely unknown in the literary academy. Over the past twenty-five years, I and other scholars have attempted to make visible those writers of Italian America, traversing a literary terrain that is as wide ranging and complex as the villages, cities, and countries about which they write. This land is their land, too, inclusive of the literary landscape, finalmente .
Many colleagues have instrumentally shaped my thinking about the literature of Italian America, offering useful suggestions on organizational and theoretical approaches to interpret this body of work. I should like to thank Nancy Workman for discussions on the initial framework of the book, with especial emphasis on the function texts serve to create a public identity through a sustained and constantly evolving community of voices. Sandra M. Gilbert's early support of my work when the field was still in its infancy further provided invaluable scholarly validation. Scholars of Italian America have persuasively explored theoretical avenues that helped me think more deeply about the vernacular origins of written expression and from them I have drawn enormous sustenance throughout the writing process: William Boelhower, Dawn Esposito, Thomas Ferraro, Fred L. Gardaphe, Edvige Giunta, Josephine Gattuso Hendin, Mary Ann Mannino, Martino Marazzi, Chris Messenger, Louise Napolitano, Mimi Pipino, Roseanne Lucia Quinn, John Paul Russo, Anthony J. Tamburri, and Robert Viscusi. With deepest gratitude I thank in particular Josephine Gattuso Hendin— la mia collega preferita —for her careful and unstinting work as a reader of drafts of every chapter of this book. Josephine's contribution to this book is inestimable; however, any limitations in thought or deficiencies in execution are purely my own.
I would also like to thank my wonderful colleague at Stony Brook University, Andrea Fedi, for his useful advice on my translations of Italian proverbs and phrases and for reading the entire manuscript with a fine-tooth comb. Developing an academic field of Italian American literature also could not be sustained without a generation of graduate students whose work has both inspired and influenced my own. In particular, I thank those students, former and present, with whom I have worked closely: Patrizia Benolich, Kristin Girard, Jessica Maucione, Michele Fazio, Jennifer DiGregorio Kightlinger, and JoAnne Ruvoli Gruba. Chapter 4 of this book on Guido D'Agostino proved to be a joy to write collaboratively with JoAnne Ruvoli Gruba; together, we mined the archives of this largely unknown writer, and made connections with relatives still living in the rural Pennsylvania so ably memorialized in D'Agostino's final novel.
A much-needed and appreciated sabbatical at Stony Brook University enabled the completion of this book. And to those academic organizations that have allowed me to share largely untested ideas and arguments on literary Italian America I thank the following: the American Italian Historical Association, MELUS (the association of Multiethnic Literature of the United States), the Modern Language Association, the Center for Italian Studies at Stony Brook University, the Calandra Institute at City University of New York, the New York Council for the Humanities Speakers Program, and the National Italian American Foundation, which supported my work as a professor at Stony Brook University, enabling more penetrating analyses of Italian American culture.
A preliminary version of chapter 1 was published in LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 13 (2002), 201–223. A portion of chapter 2 appeared in Joseph A. Varacalli et al. eds., Models and Images of Catholicism in Italian Americana: Academy and Society (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 2002), 162–174. Portions of chapter 6 first appeared in Elizabeth Messina, ed., In Our Own Voices: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Italian and Italian American Women (Boca Raton: Bordighera, 2003), 145–160. In very different and condensed form, an earlier incarnation of my analyses of post-modern texts featured in chapter 7 first appeared in Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 287–299.
I heartily thank James Peltz at State University of New York Press, and Fred Gardaphe, SUNY series editor of Italian/American Culture, whose initial enthusiasm for and ongoing support of this project made its completion a joy to experience. For their professionalism during the shepherding process of this manuscript, I thank Diane Ganeles, my production editor at SUNY Press, A&B Typesetters and Editorial Services, and Carol Inskip, who compiled the index.
Finally, I thank my partner, Judith Pfenninger, whose support of my writing life has made all the difference.
Introduction

In the beginning there are listeners and the storyteller; in the end there are the stories.
—Gioia Timpanelli, “Stories and Storytelling”
U.S. writers of Italian America give the lie to the idea represented by the code of omertà , with its injunction of silence, of keeping family matters and personal secrets private. Writers of Italian America cleverly employ that ancient rule of silence in their stories, refusing as their ancestors before them to comply with authorities represented by church and state. Translating into literature the orally transmitted tales of ancestral migrations to America, these writers tell and retell narratives of diaspora. Their immigrating forbears needn't have unloosed their tongues, for they carried with them to America verbal baggage much heavier than their trunks and valises. Perhaps in nineteenth-century villages Italians could abide a proverbio like this: “a buon intenditor poche parole,” literally translated as “for one who understands few words suffice,” wise words for those surrounded by family members to the fourth degree. But from the urban squalor of large industrialized cities to the bleak impoverishment of rural landscapes, Italian immigrants suffered both invisibility because they were not valued and hostility because they were considered an economic threat to native-born American workers. To fend off cultural annihilation, exacerbated by the xenophobia that met the second great migration, Italian immigrants managed to transmit their stories. This verbal act allowed old-world migrants to align themselves not only with their ancestors but also with their children, who inherited tales of wonder and furbizia (cunning).
Children of immigrants, caught between two languages, found creative ways to engage their parents' storytelling traditions with those tales they learned on American streets and in public schools. The literature that has emerged from over a century's worth of publications, from newspapers to novels, has revealed a culture in which verbal communication often exceeded fr