TY - JOUR
AU - Ruvoli,, JoAnne
AB - Abstract I analyze the role that personal storytelling has played in the criticism of Italian American texts to call together a community of critics and to authenticate the role of localized and “unauthorized” knowledge in the study of literature. Focusing on Marianne De Marco Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter (1994) and Fred Gardaphé’s From Wise Guys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (2006), as well as several shorter critical essays, I apply theories of narrative inquiry to show that personal storytelling is used as a method, a mode, and a metaphor in literary criticism to politicize the study of texts that have for the most part existed in the margins of canonical American literature. I claim that personal narrative establishes the credibility of the critic in still-emerging fields such as Italian American literature and documents the ethnic vernacular as well as the struggles and resistance that the critics encounter in trying to research the marginalized literature. The use of personal stories in literary criticism subverts the long-standing fallacy of the disinterested critic and directly challenges established academic values and critical standards, as well as established notions of literary criticism. In 2003, Anthony Tamburri published an essay in MELUS titled “Beyond ‘Pizza’ and ‘Nonna’! Or, What’s Bad about Italian/American Criticism?” The title alludes to the two biggest non-Mafia stereotypes of Italian American culture—“food and family”—which are, as Tamburri claims, “great themes ubiquitous in Italian/American cultural production.” In his article, Tamburri subsequently outlines some of the errors that critics of Italian American literature have made: There are those who ignore, or are ignorant of, what has preceded them; those who misrepresent what they read; those who re-write what others have already written; and those who eschew—what is today in the twenty-first century a sine qua non—theoretical issues of literary criticism. Indeed, many might say that much of this is nothing new in the general history of literary criticism. But when that literary critical voice is still young and in need of discoursing externally, as is the situation with Italian/American criticism, it is even more incumbent upon the critic to be aware of his/her surroundings. (150) While the rest of Tamburri’s essay holds many specific critics of Italian American literature accountable for their omissions and misrepresentations, the “Pizza” and “Nonna” of his title also implicate one more characteristic that many of these critical essays have in common—namely, the personal storytelling embedded in the criticism of Italian American literature, particularly stories of family. In the current literary landscape, where the use of personal storytelling in literary criticism has both advocates and antagonists, critics of Italian American literature have expanded how personal storytelling has functioned to contribute to discussions of ethnicity in novels, poems, and memoirs. In other fields of literary criticism, the equivalent might appear absurd. Does a Shakespearean scholar include stories of her grandmother attending the bard’s plays? Would a critic of British modernism write of his great-grandfather’s experience in the trenches during World War I? Are scholars who research slave narratives expected to describe ancestral experiences of slavery? I can imagine very interesting essays where this personal storytelling might occur, but I think that examples are few and far between. In the criticism of Italian American literature, however, there are far more critics who embed personal narrative into their texts than those who do not. While assessments such as Tamburri’s call for the highest quality of critical engagement with Italian American literature, the choice of critics to use stories and storytelling deserves a more complex analysis that relates directly to the ethnic and cultural narrative traditions also found in the literature. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which personal ethnic storytelling has been used in the literary criticism of Italian American narratives and to what effect. While scholarly criticism of Italian American literature is not new, the majority of the nearly fifty existing studies were published after 1990.1 The first book-length study, Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature by Olga Peragallo, was published in 1949, while the most recent monograph is Chiara Mazzucchelli’s The Heart and the Island: A Critical Study of Sicilian American Literature, published in 2015.2 While Peragallo refrains from using personal storytelling as part of her analysis, Mazzucchelli’s book includes a preface that describes how she arrived from Sicily as a graduate student and subsequently organized her Italian and American books onto different shelves. A sampling of monographs from the last fifteen years reveals the extent of the personal storytelling practiced by ethnic critics. Fred L. Gardaphé’s Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (1996) opens with a “personal account” of the suspicion his reading aroused in his family’s home (1-4). Mary Frances Pipino’s “I Have Found My Voice”: The Italian-American Woman Writer (2000) recounts an extended history of Pipino’s grandmother in a chapter that compares that family history to Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant (1999) (13-17). Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino gives the privileged position of her very last paragraph in Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women (2000) to describing her family’s history (172). In Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Authors (2002), Edvige Giunta prefaces the book with stories about moving to the United States from Sicily and includes brief stories of personal interactions with Italians and Italian Americans in several chapters. George Guida interweaves stories about his own experiences as a student in Italy along with stories of his great-grandfather through four of the five chapters of his The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise, and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative (2003). Joseph Cosco’s book on representations of Italians in turn-of-the-twentieth-century literature uses a description of his maternal grandfather’s immigrant travels through New York City in the concluding chapter of Imagining Italians: The Class of Romance and Race in American Perceptions 1880-1910 (2003) (172). Even Thomas Ferraro’s essay on Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964) in Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (2005) explicates his family’s history, including where Ferraro was born and raised and what his maternal grandmother was like, in order to claim a greater understanding of Puzo’s Lucia Santa (74-75). Family stories abound in the criticism of Italian American literature and record personal histories in critical essays. Critics of Italian American literature have used storytelling in their criticism to personalize and politicize the study of texts that have for the most part existed in the margins of canonical American literature. Mary Jo Bona’s By the Breath of their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (2010) examines the powerful and widespread use of folkloric storytelling in Italian American novels, and while she tells no personal stories of her own in her criticism, her discussion of how stories sustain the community and appeal to justice apply to critical voices as well. As storytellers, she writes, critics also “value the importance of communal voices that, when read together, offer a compelling understanding of these writers’ artistic focus on Italian America.” Indeed, like the novelists, memoirists, and poets she discusses, literary critics “create a public, literary identity for Italian Americans” and contribute to the “voices of Italian America,” which “become a collectivity of sound, illuminating distinctive communities that offer reflections, for example, on loss and dispersal without succumbing to narratives of nostalgia” (5). Like the writers that Bona examines, the stories told by critics also work to highlight marginalization and argue for social justice in academia. Personal narrative has served to establish the credibility of the critic in still emerging fields such as Italian American literature, although inserting personal stories about growing up Italian American suggests an essentialism that needs to be examined. The stories function in part to establish the authority of the critic to read for Italianitá and sometimes document the struggles and resistance that the critic may have encountered in trying to research the marginalized literature. In addition, personal stories serve as a call to the community, or a gathering of the tribe, and produce an enlarged audience that opens academic writing to non-academics. As stories lead to other stories, a critic that uses personal narrative in an academic essay invites in other critics who may have similar experiences. Social scientists such as Colette Daiute and Cynthia Lightfoot, who have used “narrative analysis” as a method and metaphor for studying development and identity, explain that “Narrative may be a metaphor for a life course, a developmental theory, a reference to a totalizing cultural force, and/or the method for interpreting oral or written narrative discourse.” As a tool for research, they describe three of the ways in which narrative has been used in social sciences: as “mode[s] of inquiry,” as “specific discourse forms,” and as “genres” (x). In criticism of Italian American literature, scholars have used personal storytelling for each of these functions. Literary criticism has traditionally perpetuated the opposition of two theories about the importance of literature: aesthetic value and social relevance. Lou Freitas Caton claims that in this debate “between the advocates of social representation and the proponents of aesthetic value,” the two “deny each other,” and “such an overdetermined, paradoxical, and apparently reductive confrontation . . . has been discussed by seemingly every generation” (3). Used alternately to include and exclude texts from the canon, these two opposing perspectives figure prominently in the story of marginalized ethnic literature in the United States. As Daiute and Lightfoot explain, “Narratives are also genres, that is, culturally developed ways of organizing experience and knowledge” (x). This kind of organization is similar to the examples Daiute and Lightfoot give of feminist and critical psychological researchers who “have used the concept of narrative as a coherent story line organized implicitly by some dominant force to characterize the values, practices, and controls inherent in groups determining who the heroes are, what life should be like, and what should be heralded or hidden” (x). If there is a critical genre of aesthetic value, it formulates the heroes as writers and critics who champion beauty of language and form to create and defend a canon of masterworks against the villains who undervalue “literariness” and “quality.” High profile examples of this genre of criticism include texts such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987) and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), which promote the “great books” canon for the purpose of preserving cultural standards. In the social relevance genre of literary criticism, the heroes are the scholars and critics who recover and rescue marginalized and long-neglected texts from obscurity. Paul Lauter, the general editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (first published in 1990), is a representative example of a scholar in this genre and defines several characteristics of the genre in his introduction to The Heath: [S]cholars in the late 1960s, recognizing the richness and diversity of American culture, began to seek out the large number of lost, forgotten, or suppressed literary texts which had emerged from and illustrated that diversity. That has been a long and slow process for it entailed not only locating, editing, and publishing such work, but also rethinking traditional ideas about what is of value in literature, as well as what intellectual frameworks [to use] for studying it. (“To” xxxiii-xxxiv)3 Examples of this political genre include nearly fifty years of recovered texts by women, African Americans, and other ethnic writers.4 As the larger narratives at work in literary criticism, aesthetic value and social relevance are often simplistically positioned in opposition. As ever-shifting examples of good and bad approaches to literature, the debate continues in journals, conference presentations, curriculum meetings, and classrooms. Some critics argue that social relevance and representative texts are most important while other critics claim that the aesthetic value of the text is the standard by which to judge the text’s importance.5 Other critics find that discussion and analysis of the opposition of aesthetic value and social relevance produces a more complete story when writing about or teaching literary texts.6 Viewing literary criticism as a narrative that includes several competing genres illustrates how narrative organizes values and practices for critics. While there are other genres of literary criticism, researchers of Italian American literature have positioned the texts for which they advocate between the critical genres of social relevance and aesthetic value. Engaging in the “long and slow process” that Lauter describes of “locating, editing, and publishing” (“To” xxxiii-xxxiv) out-of-print texts, Italian American critics took the first steps for emerging criticisms of excluded noncanonical literature. Like the other recovery projects growing out of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the criticism followed other fields of ethnic literature by first establishing that these Italian American texts exist and then by dramatizing how and why the texts were excluded from the established literary community. Proving an absence is a most difficult task, but Helen Barolini’s introduction to The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian America Women (1985) uses personal storytelling to document and examine how the material and sociopolitical aspects of the Italian American experience exacerbated the aesthetic reception of texts by Italian American writers, specifically women. Lauter has discussed the role that anthologies have played in the revision of literary history, citing “magazines, publishing houses and anthologies” as “central to certain significant cultural movements” (Canons 53). Barolini’s The Dream Book is an illustrative example of Lauter’s explanation of how writers and editors have “defined their own distinctive voices, creat[ed] their own artistic forms and critical discourses, develop[ed] their own institutions, their own foci for cultural work” (Canons 53). As John Guillory has theorized, canonical revision “posits a homology between the process of exclusion by which socially defined minorities are excluded from the exercise of power or from political representation and the process of selection, by which certain works are designated canonical, others noncanonical” (6). The personal storytelling embedded in Barolini’s critical introduction dramatizes this complex relationship between exclusion and selection while providing anecdotal evidence to defend her claims in a way that consequently documents and reads the stories into the academic record. Barolini’s stories fall into several categories and connect the national noncanonical status of Italian American literature to the internal and external obstacles faced by Italian American women writers. In order to characterize the sociopolitical problems of ethnic literature, she includes quotes from oral interviews that anthropologists have conducted with Italian immigrant women (Introduction 9, 11), stories about her children bringing ethnic food to their schools (20), and examples from a number of letters that other Italian American women writers and readers have sent to her (22, 45, 46, 49). In addition to the academic studies from which she draws, she provides evidence from oral sources, such as conversations and interviews, which help to fill the silence about and absence of Italian American women writers. For example, in defining the reasons that the Italian immigrants favored oral culture over written culture, a preference that inhibited the education and literacy of Italian Americans, Barolini offers expert opinion, but, instead of citing a journal article or monograph, she describes a dialogue that she had with a psychoanalyst in which research about oral culture is presented as a spoken exchange: A conversation with Dr. Marie Badaracco-Apolito, a psychoanalyst, was most illuminating in the area of language and meaning. We were both speculating, from experience, on how little value Italians attach to exact meaning and the literalness of words. Parole femmine, they say in Italian: words are feminine, words are for women, frivolous and volatile. Deeds are masculine; men engage in action which is concrete, real. (4) In other words, women use words; men act. Words and writing are not valued as much as the masculine “concrete, real” actions. The story locates characteristics of Italian ethnicity in oral culture and through her phrasing—“speculating, from experience” and “they say in Italian”—emphasizes the relevance of the unwritten information in narrative. Barolini’s epistemological construction of gendered language uses results from her spoken collaboration with the psychoanalyst and is reinforced by Italian oral culture. Through narrative, Barolini is able to repeatedly document ideas and evidence that are located in lived experience and oral culture. The Dream Book then becomes the written source for these concepts previously found in oral culture. Barolini dramatizes the process she followed to uncover the fifty-six writers ultimately represented in the anthology with stories that simultaneously ask questions and provide answers about why Italian American women have been “excluded” and why there is a perception that they were not “selected,” to borrow Guillory’s terms. In one example, she writes: In my search for authors for this work, I asked the curator of a large collection of books and manuscripts by American women if it included any works by women of Italian American background. “No,” she told me, “this collection represents just la crème de la crème. For instance, if Christina Rossetti were American, not English, she’d be represented.” I asked about Frances Winwar. “Oh, yes, of course,” was the answer, “but I never thought of her as Italian.” (6) The curator clearly does not view Winwar as Italian or Italian American, and this anecdote illustrates at least three contradictory ideas that impact the writers Barolini is championing in The Dream Book. First, the curator assumes no “woman of Italian American background” would be included in the collection because her material represents “la crème de la crème.” Second, the story validates the perceived aesthetic quality of Francis Winwar because she has been selected as representative of “la crème de la crème.” Third, the story troubles definitions of what characterizes Italian American ethnicity in writers; that is, what does the curator consider when thinking of a writer “as Italian”? Barolini does not explicate the story; it is followed by transitional blank space that acts as a pause and a call to contemplate the contradictions. In another extended section of her introduction, Barolini describes the “behind the scenes” support that Mary Gordon’s first novel Final Payments (1978) received. Like Winwar, Gordon’s name masks her Italian American heritage. Because Gordon is backed by “older established authors who add to their own luster with their literary discoveries,” Barolini outlines how Gordon’s mentors—Philip Booth, Elizabeth Hardwick, Margaret Drabble, and John Leonard—each contributed to Final Payments’ publication and success (38). While the special advocacy does not detract from Gordon’s accomplishment, Barolini’s story reveals the dominant literary establishment’s production of authors. She consciously outlines an Italian American writer who has access to the cultural capital of other writers, critics, teachers, and reviewers to debunk what Lauter has termed “the apparently self-evident character of the canon” (Canons 53). Barolini claims that “Literary achievement is gauged by appearance in required reading lists, literature course outlines, textbooks, anthologies, critical appraisal, book reviews, and bibliographies.” Because of the years of limited education—caused by poverty, gendered family structures, and the internal psychological pressures on Italian American writers—the elements that lead to literary achievement are “[a]ll things that Italian American writers have been largely excluded from—not by design, but because they lacked prominent names and advocacy” (Introduction 39). The story of Gordon’s success, like the conversation Barolini cites with the curator, is another oral source, a panel discussion sponsored by the Authors’ Guild.7 One last story that Barolini relates in her introduction originates in her work as a librarian and dramatizes how support services such as indexing contribute to compounding the invisibility of publications by Italian American writers. Barolini observes that “When teachers, editors, compilers consult the Wilson [indexing] volumes for, say the names of authors who are writing about Italian Americans so that they can be included in syllabi, presented at conferences, studied and commented on, they are naturally led to the conclusion that there are pitifully few Italian American authors” (46). Again faced with the task of proving an absence, she turns to narrating her own experience working with the Wilson indexes.8 She describes the process by which texts attain institutional academic importance—syllabi, conferences, and critical writing—and makes visible the labor involved behind the supposedly self-evident label of “canonical.” Barolini outlines six series, including the bibliography of American Historical Fiction, the Literary History of the United States, the Library of Literary Criticism, Contemporary Literary Critics, The Book Review Index, and The Ethnic American Woman, where there are no Italian American novels or writers listed, men or women, “as if,” she writes, “Di Donato, Fante, Tomasi, Winwar, Mangione, DeCapite, etc., had never written” (47). As she does in her previous stories, Barolini connects the “exclusion” to ethnicity. She claims that these absences “demonstrate the self-perpetuating myth on the part of readers, editors, professors (and the demoralizing perception among Italian Americans themselves) that Italian American literature is second-rate because if it were not, it would be included in the Wilson publications and other collections” (48). Barolini documents strategies for tracking down more Italian American writers. She gives narrative evidence for her analysis of the absence of these writers, which she proves is much more complicated than a claim that they did not write or did not publish or even that they did not publish aesthetically pleasing writing. To a lesser extent, Gardaphé uses a similar narrative strategy in his introduction to Italian Signs, American Streets. He opens his critical monograph with “a brief personal account of the role that reading and writing have played in the development of [his] own ethnic identity.” He states his purpose more directly than Barolini and aligns himself with other critics of ethnic literature: “The study of ethnic literature is more than reading and responding to the literary products created by minority cultures; it is a process that, for its advocate, necessarily involves a self-politicization that requires placing a personal item onto a public agenda” (1). The public agenda in this case is calling together an audience. Once a text is granted a certain status through venues such as newspaper reviews, conferences, course inclusions, or journal articles that place it into a context and academic conversation, an audience is built and can compound through the interplay of each venue as in the example of Gordon’s Final Payments. As Lauter explains, “a literary culture requires the existence of an audience, a reading public that, on the one hand, resonates to the beat of the writers’ language and concerns and that, on the other hand, serves its needs by reading” (Canons 52). Personal stories about reading dramatize the environmental and institutional obstacles that ethnic literatures have to overcome to build such an audience. As Barolini and Gardaphé show, Italian American ethnicity can draw readers to powerful literary experiences and can be used to validate those experiences. Just as feminists have argued that the personal is political, Gardaphé uses personal stories to show how his experience of reading books became politicized, first in his family environment and then at his school.9 In his home, the time he spent reading “was seen as a problem and quickly identified [him] as the ‘’merican’ or rebel” (Italian 1). He next describes receiving Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) from an aunt who had not read it but told his mother that “if he was so intent on reading, he might as well read a book about Italians.” Gardaphé claims: “The Godfather was the first book with which I could completely identify, and it inspired my choice of the Mafia as a topic for the dreaded senior thesis that my Irish Catholic prep school required” (2). His family environment and reaction to Puzo’s best seller mirrors a story Barolini tells in The Dream Book’s introduction. She writes: “By an early age, I too, had a good start on what is a major motif in Italian American writing—the sense of being out of line with one’s surroundings, not of one’s family and not of the world beyond the family: an outsider” (19). Like Gardaphé, the story Barolini tells illustrates the role that readers play in the status of Italian American literature and the way that Italian American books create politicized readers out of Italian Americans. Barolini is also given a book written by Italian American writer Alma Aquilino, Seeds of Doubt (1940), and it changes her thinking about Italian ethnicity. The poems in the book appeal to her “own uneasiness, [her] own sense of doubt,” but the poet’s ethnic identity outshines the content, as she explains: “And even more powerful was the fact—unheard of!—that a female with an Italian name had written a book.” Seeds of Doubt gives Barolini a counternarrative to organize her thoughts and ambitions. She explains how the book helps her expand her ideas about Italian experience: “My schooling had provided no texts by authors with Italian names, no expectation that people of my background had a rich literature. We were told, instead, of Italian illiteracy” (19). Both Gardaphé and Barolini point a finger at schools for enforcing not only an absence of Italian American literature but also the illegitimacy of the idea of Italian American literature. While Barolini was taught that Italians were illiterate, Gardaphé was given a lesson in linguistic hierarchy and canonical judgment. The senior thesis inspired by The Godfather was graded down not only because Gardaphé “depended too much on Italian sources” but also because, in the “serious scholarship” expected at the elite school, the fact that Gardaphé “was of Italian descent” impeded his “essential” objectivity required of “serious scholarship” (Italian 2). In their reaction to his thesis, Gardaphé’s teachers sent him chasing his tail—by linking their critique to his ethnicity and perpetuating the myth of the “disinterested critic.”10 If Gardaphé’s newly discovered Italian American literature were ever to receive “serious study,” his ethnicity, according to the logic of the teachers, bars him from being the scholar to do it. The very thing that called him to study—Italian American ethnicity—is the very thing that disqualifies him from doing the work, at least in the lessons of his senior thesis. Both Barolini’s and Gardaphé’s stories illustrate the interweaving of aesthetic value and social relevance and the contradictory dynamics of Guillory’s exclusion and selection. Both critics are politicized to different degrees by the experiences reflected in each of their stories. Barolini writes: “Seeds of Doubt explained much and revealed much to me—I was no longer alone” (Introduction 22). She researched, recovered, and collected the Italian American women writers in The Dream Book anthology and has written novels (including Umbertina [1979]), stories, and essays of her own. Gardaphé was also provoked to “search for and read books by Italian Americans” and briefly maps out his personal journey through his studies, first as an aspiring young writer then as a graduate student and professor (Italian 2). In their use of personal storytelling, Barolini and Gardaphé encourage their readers to read through the lens of their own relationships to literature and ethnicity. The critic draws attention to her own experience and makes the personal political by framing academic essays with personal narratives and embedding stories in her criticism. The obstacles that the critic has overcome to study the texts become part of the argument. Embedding personal narratives within academic criticism writes ethnographic and oral knowledge into the academic record and documents Italian American experience and traditions for use by other scholars while focusing interpretation through the ethnocritical lens. When researchers use narrative in this fashion, they construct what Daiute and Lightfoot term “specific discourse forms,” for “[n]arratives are also specific discourse forms, occurring as embodiments of cultural values and personal subjectivities” (x). Social scientists challenge epistemological structures by adding narrative to their discursive disciplines. Similarly, personal narratives can challenge the accepted forms of knowledge, as Jay Clayton claims, “by drawing on oral forms; . . . exploring less privileged written genres; . . . identifying the contemporary text with archaic symbolic modes; . . . and . . . writing about traditional activities” (95). These “unauthorized” forms of knowledge are used by Italian American novelists to challenge established values and canonical characteristics, and when Italian American critics use similar strategies, the narratives gain status as discourse and subvert established notions of criticism. Critics of Italian American literature embed personal storytelling in their essays as important components of their arguments. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter (1994), sections of Robert Viscusi’s Buried Caesars and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (2006), and sections of Gardaphé’s From Wise Guys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (2006) not only challenge established traditions of criticism by inserting personal narratives and vernacular voices into their analysis of the texts but also use these strategies to further highlight the orality and storytelling features in the texts under investigation.11 In his chapter in From Wise Guys to Wise Men titled “Fresh Garbage: The Gangster as Today’s Trickster,” Gardaphé writes about David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999-2007) and Tony Ardizzone’s In the Garden or Papa Santuzzu (1999), opening with an extended personal narrative: “In my neighborhood when I was growing up, there was a character we used to call the ‘Ragsaline Man.’ He got his nickname because he would call out ‘Ragsaline, ragsaline,’ as he drove an ancient truck slowly through the neighborhood looking for rags, old iron, and other junk” (149-50). The memory operates as an introductory metaphor for Gardaphé’s argument that Chase and Ardizzone recycle the gangster figure, but the two-part story does a number of other things as well. First, Gardaphé has inscribed a significant figure of Italian American collective folk history—the Ragsaline Man—into the written academic record. The ragpicker figure appears in several Italian American novels, including Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1980), but historical documentation about his role in the local community is scarce. What documentary evidence there is about what the ragpicker did as he roamed the neighborhoods is more likely to be found in the oral histories of community members or buried in an archive such as the Chicago Historical Society’s photo collection, which holds an unlabeled photo of a Chicago ragpicker. When the story behind the photo is lost, the ability to understand the photos and the ragpicker’s role in the novels is lost as well. Gardaphé’s description of the Ragsaline man memory segues into a description of his grandparents: Since I had grandparents who were Italian immigrants, I was not surprised that this man could treasure other people’s garbage. We were all taught that it was a sin to waste, and to avoid that sin we had to develop new ways of seeing. In our house we were admonished for anything that might potentially be wasted. If an adult saw a child had not consumed all of the food on his or her plate, the adult would first chide the child, and then, quite often, take what was left on the plate and eat it. Many of our meals consisted of animal parts that butchers threw away or sold very cheaply. When it came to meals, we simply did not leave food on our plates. Anything not eaten in one meal would find its way into subsequent meals. Clothes that no longer fit were passed on to those who could wear them, or they were shipped to Italy. When clothes became unwearable, they were torn neatly into cleaning rags. Nothing was wasted. Our immigrant grandparents, trained to behave this way out of poverty, passed on their frugal habits. (150) This second part of Gardaphé’s personal story, like the memory of the Ragsaline Man, emphasizes reusing clothes and food and serves to introduce his argument that Chase and Ardizzone recycle the literary representation of the gangster into a trickster figure. However, Gardaphé also records the ideology behind the actions of the grandparents, linking the frugality and thrift to not only the ragpicker but also the Italian American community. Elizabeth Stone writes about the “collective meaning” of family stories and states that “collective understanding is exactly what allows these stories to serve purposes other than entertainment” (10). When Gardaphé connects his family story to the ragpicker, he extends the Italian American family to include the rest of the community served by the ragpicker. As Torgovnick writes, the “I” “asserts, in philosophical terms, the subject status of the speaker or writer,” and the “we” “amplifies the same strategy with a leap into the universal that allows the writer to speak for the culture” (“Politics” 142). Gardaphé’s singular “I” transforms into the communal “we,” and his story takes on the resonance of the collective cultural history of the community, which becomes an important aspect of his argument. Robert Viscusi uses personal storytelling in several of his chapters to construct a form of “specific discourse” from personal oral history. Similar to Gardaphé, Viscusi’s use of the pronoun “we” extends his mother’s words to represent the larger Italian American community. The first paragraph of chapter one, “English as a Dialect of Italian,” establishes the scope of that representation: “We don’t speak Italian,” my mother used to say, “we speak dialect.” Everything we spoke, English included, was a dialect of Italian. We had a clear sense that we did not speak any national language at all. As far as we were concerned, national standard Italian was exactly what Dante had meant it to be when he first proposed it: an imperial tongue—that is, a language whose speakers were by definition cosmopolitans. My grandparents were all immigrants, which means they were transnationals, to be sure, but no one would have called them cosmopolitan. (25) What starts as a story of the often repeated comment made by Viscusi’s mother transforms almost immediately into a broader representation of Italian Americans in the sentence, “Everything we spoke, English included, was a dialect of Italian.” Sandra Dolby Stahl has claimed that personal storytelling invites “someone to know him, to know her, intimately” (x) and share “certain cultural resources” in the “effort to persuade or influence the audience” (42) and that, in “indulging his sense of intimacy,” a storyteller such as Viscusi “believes that the relationship between himself and his audience is sufficiently intimate to allow for the typical proliferation of esoteric allusions” (43). In other words, when Viscusi combines the “we” of his mother’s story with the “we” of his claim, he implicates his audience as part of that “we” and forces his readers to take on the shared characteristics of the community.12 Like his grandparents, the reader is given the subject position of immigrant who is outside of the national Italian language and outside of American Standard English: “And as for English,” Viscusi writes, “that was another imperial tongue and still something to conquer. ‘Learn English!’ My mother was determined that we should master this language as well as possible” (“English” 25). Throughout the chapter, Viscusi periodically returns to the narrative about his mother’s dialect, its history in the mountain “town of Salle, provincia di Chieti, high in the Apenninies of Abruzzi” (26), and how his mother learned its status as a nonstandard dialect (32-33). Along the way, he tells a story about the similarly unique traditions that the family practiced when his grandmother cooked polenta with one meatball placed in the center of the dish (29). The personal stories about his mother’s and his family’s use of dialect help him to analyze how the origins of Italian American literature exist between the traditions of Italian and American literary cultures and document that oral experience at the same time. By assuming the reader’s relationship with ethnic identity, Viscusi, in a sense, constructs the relationship with Italian American experience for the reader even if it does not already exist. In Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway, she includes a chapter titled “The Godfather as the World’s Most Typical Novel,” in which the opening paragraph addresses her own use of personal narrative: When I wrote about The Godfather in 1986, I slipped in references to Italian Americans and felt as though I had put chocolate kisses inside my critical essay—little autobiographical nuggets, pieces of myself. This essay turned out to be a bridge piece for me. I was trying out autobiographical writing; it felt awfully good. I was opening myself to different kinds of writing and exploring subjects about which I never used to allow myself even to think. I was experimenting in print with ethnic identity, talking for the first time in my writing about being an Italian American woman. I hadn’t abandoned ties with my family or denied ethnicity in daily life: I looked Italian, cooked Italian and observed many Italian customs. But now, for the first time, as I connected my work with my personal history, I saw being Italian American as part of my life as a teacher and writer. (109) As a personal story about the writing of the essay, Torgovnick foregrounds the embedded personal narratives in the essay and links her ethnic identity as an Italian American to her analysis of Puzo’s novel. Her language and tone—“chocolate kisses” and “autobiographical nuggets”—minimize the importance of these embedded personal stories at the same time that she highlights them by bringing them to the readers’ attention. She also sets up an essentializing definition of Italian American ethnic identity—“I looked Italian, cooked Italian and observed many Italian customs,” she writes, in rhyme no less, implying that readers will know what it means to “look” and “cook” Italian. The effect of this opening is that it sets up an insider/outsider dynamic. She is claiming insider knowledge that will help her to analyze and explain Puzo’s novel. The breezy phrase that she takes from Lionel Trilling and uses repeatedly throughout the essay is the “hum and buzz” of lived ethnic culture (115). She writes that “The Godfather gives us the hum and buzz of Italian American culture, quite apart from its portrayal of the distinct and much smaller subculture of the Mafia” (116). The vernacular here again implies a generalized, unbounded insider knowledge of Italian American ethnicity yet separates out the Mafia experience. Torgovnick’s reading of Puzo’s women in this essay uses her insider knowledge by relating stories of her family and by clearly marking how “outsiders” might read a cultural issue. When discussing Lucy Mancini’s status as a college student in the novel, Torgovnick describes her own insider knowledge: that during the era of the novel, an Italian American girl who attended college would be considered sexually promiscuous. This knowledge is something that Sonny Corleone would consider before taking Lucy on as his young mistress. She writes: Lucy’s morals are suspect as “thoroughly Americanized.” In Bakhtinian terms, the values and the language of the traditional Italian American infiltrate the novel. To people outside the Italian American community, the distinction between Italian and American would seem spurious, especially since Lucy is, like most younger guests at the wedding, American-born. To outsiders, attending college would seem natural, even desirable, with a college education implying nothing about a young woman’s “reputation.” (117) This passage uses theoretical language to render the insider knowledge, and she repeats that she is talking about how outsiders will read Lucy’s sexual reputation incorrectly. Torgovnick claims that she was “part of that generation” of Italian American children who benefited from the “scholarships and degrees” opened to them “in the decade following Sputnik” and admits that her “own mother could not understand [her] desire to go to college, thinking that [she] should instead become a secretary” (118). By relating the experience of Puzo’s characters to her own life, she establishes the expertise that will allow her to document anecdotal and vernacular evidence to support her analysis. Later, Torgovnick returns to this issue of the sexual reputation of women, which she argues is central to the novel and provides purpose to the violent actions of the men. Again, she sets her identity as a critic against her ethnic identity as an Italian American woman: “The emphasis on male power so pervasive in The Godfather has had distinct and in many ways undesirable consequences for Italian American culture, as well as consequences in my own life that make me especially sensitive to it” (121). As Stahl has written of other “literary folklorists,” Torgovnick calls attention to her reading of the gendered Italianitá of Puzo’s novel by explaining Stahl’s assertion “that the process of hearing [or reading] the text is a creative act in which the listener’s [or critic’s] own large store of cultural and personal resources is used to produce a unified resonance of meaning” (2). Torgovnick foregrounds her interpretation by establishing the cultural identity and knowledge base from which she draws her analysis: “As a female born in Brooklyn in 1949, my own attitudes towards being Italian American are considerably more ambivalent than those of males I know” (“Godfather” 121). Torgovnick, like Viscusi and Gardaphé, documents cultural attitudes through stories and writes vernacular community knowledge into the academic record. All three critics use the concept of the “hum and buzz” of lived ethnic culture as part of the analysis. Torgovnick is especially direct about her use of personal storytelling to document gendered issues, which very well may not be documented elsewhere: It is difficult to prove, except by anecdotal evidence, how strongly Italian American culture in the period and place covered by Puzo’s novel resisted the idea of college and careers for women, even while beginning to entertain those ideas for men. But Puzo’s novel provides traces of such evidence, and even anecdotes can be compelling. So let me give one, by quoting a young man, an Italian American soon to be college-bound, who informed me, in the sixties (echoing the movie Marty in all seriousness), that “college girls are one step above the gutter.” (121) Torgovnik documents the Italian American attitudes toward Italian American college women in her essay in order to analyze Puzo’s novel, offering the popular 1955 film Marty as additional support, and now the previously unwritten cultural attitude is part of the academic record and available for others to study or quote at an academic conference, in classrooms, or in journal articles and books. The personal storytelling undertaken by Torgovnick, Viscusi, and Gardaphé constructs a relationship with readers that encourages identification with Italian American experience, but it can also exclude readers not familiar with Italian American ethnicity. Whether or not this constructed opposition between cultural insiders and outsiders will bring readers, teachers, and scholars to Italian American literature is a pressing question that the last section of this article will address. However, there is no doubt that the stories told by Torgovnick, Viscusi, and Gardaphé not only provide an important window to the vernacular ethnic elements in the novels but also inscribe collective oral history into what Daiute and Lightfoot call “specific discourse forms” for other scholars and readers to access. Daiute and Lightfoot define a third category of narrative analysis as a mode of inquiry based on “root metaphor.” They write: “As a metaphor, narrative analysis involves explaining psychological phenomena as meanings that are ordered from some theoretical perspective, like that of a storyteller, and consist of information and comments about the significance of that information” (x). In a world where meaning is constructed through the interaction and juxtaposition of stories, which are also shaped by language, setting personal stories next to argumentative interpretations links the two meanings and allows a reader to read the argument through the lens of the story. In “Fresh Garbage,” Gardaphé’s personal stories about the Ragsaline man and the frugality of his grandparents become metaphors. As stories used to interpret other stories, the Ragsaline man and the thrifty grandparents embody characteristics and values of Italian American culture, which are then applied to the manner in which Gardaphé analyzes the reenvisioned gangster as trickster. He writes: This tradition of seeing garbage in a fresh light, of not wasting anything, of making something out of nothing and seeing one’s ancestors in the result, provides a good frame for understanding the new version of the American gangster presented in Chase’s HBO television series The Sopranos and in Tony Ardizzone’s novel In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu. (150) Recent theories of metaphor, such as James Seitz’s discussion of the literalist position on metaphor, have contended that the effect a metaphor has on the reader is more important than what a metaphor might mean. Seitz notes that “What matters most, in other words, is not the interaction between the elements of a metaphor,”— the example he uses is “Men are wolves”—“but the interaction between a metaphor and those toward whom it is directed” (97). Obviously, men are not literal wolves, but the writer’s use of the language sets the reader on a complex search for meaning, which begins with rejecting the equivalency of the metaphor as false.13 According to Seitz, this rejection signals the presence of figurative language and then stimulates readers to “make the vision produced by the metaphor their own; they must see as it asks them to see, whereby its two elements become not just comparable but identical” (108). If Seitz is correct, then the use of personal storytelling as narrative metaphor acts as other frames have done when used by novelists. The narrative metaphor tries to focus the reader’s view of the material connected by the metaphor as narrative frames do in fiction—for example, the transition Gardaphé uses to construct the narrative metaphor that connects his extended story to his argument: “As a crafty ragpicker, [Chase] cast an eye over the garbage heap of film characters, picked up the discarded gangster, dusted him off, and gave him a new life by settling him back down in the suburbs, where today over 60 percent of US Americans live” (“Fresh” 150-51). In the logic of this narrative metaphor, Chase is the crafty ragpicker and therefore part of Italian American collective history that is also connected to the Italian American communal experience embodied by the Ragsaline man and the frugal grandparents. The equivalency of the narrative metaphor asks readers to accept Chase not only as ragpicker but also as part of the tradition of other Italian American writers. Extended further, Gardaphé’s storytelling appeals, especially, to resistant Italian American readers who may object to the The Sopranos and Chase’s use of Mafia storylines. The use of narrative metaphors sometimes appears simplistic because of the accessibility of personal storytelling. The critical writer runs the risk that the reader will not be convinced by the metaphor and that the initial rejection of the equivalency implied in the metaphor will not stimulate the reader’s engagement with the figurative language or the search for wider meaning. The academic literary community has discouraged the use of personal stories presented as part of argumentative essays.14 However, narrative theorists such as David Schaafsma have claimed that personal storytelling is especially persuasive when implemented in cases “invested with intentionality—passionate, experiential knowing” (30). Emerging fields such as Italian American literary criticism collectively commit to building a community of individuals. Until recently, the critics who have worked on Italian American literature have relied on their own experience with Italian American culture because its oral tradition and “experiential” ways of knowing have left gaps in the written record. Because there are now a significant number of critical studies of Italian American literature, researchers may depend less on personal storytelling to document Italianitá, but they have not abandoned the use of personal storytelling as a rhetorical strategy. Schaafsma writes: “The nature of story is to heighten the indeterminacy, the possibility of change in reality by demonstrating through the interplay of voices the shifting nature of experience” (31). Critics well versed in characteristics of Italian American storytelling use this persuasive strategy to challenge established definitions of or approaches to literature. Several critics use personal storytelling as a metaphor in the narrative analysis of texts, as Gardaphé does, when the audience may be resistant to the text’s relationship with Italian American ethnicity. The strong and very vocal anti-Sopranos faction of the Italian American audience opposed Chase’s portrayal of the criminal Mafia elements linked to the Italian American family elements. Gardaphé’s choice of narrative metaphor purposefully targets this part of the audience. Roseanne Giannini Quinn uses personal storytelling as a narrative metaphor to establish the relationship between Italian American ethnicity and Carole Maso’s AVA: A Novel (1993), a text with no obvious markers of Italian American experience or culture.15 Quinn uses opening and closing sections of personal storytelling to fully frame her argumentative essay in narrative metaphor. Maso’s AVA is an experimental novel that portrays the fragmented deathbed thoughts of the narrator Ava Klein. The style of the novel is what Quinn calls “formal disruptions”; she explains: “From the top to bottom of every page, there is a line or two, sometimes three or four, and then a blank space before the next line or two appears” (“‘We’” 94). Because of this distinctive style, other critics have focused their essays on the form of the novel. Ava Klein is a professor of comparative literature and the child of Holocaust survivors, and both issues have directed the arguments of other critical essays. Still other essays have been published on Maso’s postmodernism and her gendered poetics. By writing about the Italian American cultural and sexual identity underlying AVA, Quinn’s approach to the novel offers an alternate reading that challenges and enlarges the body of writing on this novel. Quinn opens her essay with a four-paragraph personal story about her own search for Italian American identity that begins, “Throughout my childhood, I was brought up to be Italian and I was brought up to be American: two distinct identities not to be merged but to exist somehow simultaneously not quite one and not exactly the other, in a kind of hybrid state” (91). She recounts listening to Italian lullabies, taking Italian language classes, and then traveling to Italy as “la turista.” The story ends with the “young Italians” rejecting Quinn as another American: They resented my presence and did not see any connection at all to who I was, and what I looked like, to who they were and where they lived and what they wanted. When I returned to the United States, I didn’t feel so Italian anymore. I’ve been wondering ever since how to assert a non-anglo American identity, a specifically Italian one, at the same time that I know Italy is not my home. (92) Quinn’s narrative of rejection and dislocation is a familiar tale to many third- and fourth-generation children of immigrants and firmly establishes that her essay is going to engage identity politics. Quinn asks outright: “What constitutes Italian-American culture for a third-generation daughter born of a second-generation parent?” (92). In her use of the personal story as narrative metaphor, Quinn sets up an equivalency between her own search for cultural identity and the questions raised by Maso’s book. While Quinn does not use a direct transition as Gardaphé does when he connects the ragpicker to Chase, her question links directly to the question she asks of the novel: “What place does Carole Maso’s AVA have as literature which can be read as something distinctively third generation Italian-American?” (93). She equates her third-generation search for identity with the book’s third-generation search for identity. As Seitz explains, a narrative metaphor evokes a rejection of the equivalency first, and Quinn enacts this initial stage for the reader: “After all, Ava as a character is not Italian-American nor is she Italian. She is Jewish and is set forth to wander in the text from New York to Europe and back again” (Quinn, “‘We’” 93). By articulating the reader’s objection to the metaphor, Quinn acknowledges the logical steps she is asking the reader to take. Next, she coaxes the reader to move beyond his or her reaction and suggests a way that the reader may engage in seeing the metaphor as meaningful: “Unlike Ava,” she writes, “the author of her story, Carole Maso, is of Italian-American descent and has written about the consequences of Italian-American assimilation directly in her first book Ghost Dance” (93). From this point, Quinn builds on Maso’s Italian American lineage and her previous books to draw the reader further into the argument about AVA. “Read within this context,” Quinn claims, “I understand Carole Maso’s work as a reclamation of a lost Italian cultural legacy where an essential component of italianitá is that it encompasses and is intertwined with the recovering of a woman-centered culture which has suffered complex modes of destruction and erasure” (94). That is, the personal story about recovering a lost identity that opens the essay is fully embodied in the claim her essay is making about AVA and Maso’s work in general. Quinn ends her essay with another personal narrative. More than a concluding echo of the introduction, framing the end with another scene of dislocation and rejection turns the essay back onto itself and forces the reader to reconsider the opening story. Quinn writes: When I think about all that Ava does manage to say and those empty spaces in between, where Carole Maso urges the reader to find “a place to breathe,” I think of my own state of cultural dislocation and feel comforted. I still do not know how I will better negotiate being Italian and American but there are possibilities there, strength in the amalgam, opportunities for reconciliation: songs to be sung, music played, stories told, women loved. (109) Reinterpreting Quinn’s search for identity through the Italian lullabies, language, and trips to Italy as “comfort[ing]” or filled with “possibilities” rewrites the negative “cultural dislocation” as a positive place for potential, which is a direct result of Quinn’s analysis of AVA. At this point, the “equivalency” of the narrative metaphor is transformed by the discussion of AVA and has become stronger. In the final scene of the essay, the critic, the character, and the book merge together in common experience: I went to look for you, Ava Klein, at the unwelcoming, understocked bookstore in the small Midwestern town in which I temporarily resided. You were not on the shelves, your book I mean, so I went to the back of the bookstore, where the store’s owner and the store’s manager were busy on their bookstore computers.  “I’m looking for Ava,” I said, “She’s not on the shelf . . . I mean I’m looking for Carole Maso’s book, AVA.”  “She’s in the basement,” said the two men at the same time. (109) In this short scene, the book, character, and critic are misplaced: Quinn is “temporarily” set in a Midwestern town and searches for the Ava Klein character closed up in the physical object of the book, which has been deposited in the discarded margins of the store’s basement.16 After some time passes, the store’s manager returns from the lower spaces with AVA, “wrapped in clear plastic” and without a price tag. The man turns hostile: “‘Here she is,’ he said, ‘twenty percent off,’ tossing the book toward me in disgust” (110). While more literal and melodramatic, the clerk’s reaction mirrors the rejection of the “young Italians” that Quinn relates in her opening story. On a grander scale, it is also a metaphor for the rejection of Italian American literature, as Maso’s AVA is stored in the dark basement out of sight. After Quinn’s purchase, the image of the dancing woman on the book cover calls to her: “Somewhere Ava says, ‘Shifting voices and constant breaks of mode let silence have its share and allow for a fuller meditative field than is possible in linear narrative or analysis’ ([Maso]184), or is it you who is talking, Carole Maso, giving me a place to begin” (110). Analyzing a novel full of “shifting voices and constant breaks of mode,” Quinn uses the storytelling and hybridized forms of Italian American experience to both discuss a nontraditional novel and orient it in the traditions of Italian American thought. Narrative theorists see examples such as the Quinn, Gardaphé, Torgovnick, Viscusi, and Barolini texts as important and write about narrative as an ideology that clashes with hierarchical structures in the academy that control or restrict activities such as publishing and tenure. If frames and embedded stories in criticism both legitimatize and subvert as they do in fictional texts, the stakes may be even higher in critical texts that use storytelling. There are still a number of questions to be answered that the use of personal storytelling has raised for the criticism of Italian American literature. Does the use of framing and embedding personal narratives in literary criticism put too much emphasis on the critic’s personal experience such that a critic will have to prove a certain level of Italian Americanness to be accepted as a scholar of Italian American literature? As form follows content, what elements in Italian American texts encourage critics to use stories when interpreting and analyzing texts? Critics have to remain attentive to how their personal stories move arguments forward and document vernacular knowledge that illuminates the literature under discussion. What effect will the collective use of personal storytelling in studies of Italian American texts have on attracting more scholars to the field or persuading instructors to teach Italian American texts in more generalized or comparative courses? For every Gardaphé or Torgovnick or Barolini text, there are examples of personalized storytelling that are not effectively integrated into the analysis and that can be read as the superfluous “Pizza and Nonna” stories targeted by Tamburri’s critique. Ultimately, we should not come to a point where the techniques and strategies that called the ethnic community together to produce the field now keep that community closed to new scholars. Footnotes 1. There are several possible reasons for the flourishing of critical work in Italian American studies around this time. The 1985 publication of The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women identified a community of writers for the first time and brought together writers with critics at a series of readings. Several years later, the national spotlight focused on the August 1989 Bensonhurst murder case of Yusef Hawkins at the hands of young men, some of whom were Italian American. The controversial success of Spike Lee’s films Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991) showcased the tensions between Italian American and African American characters and provoked public dialogue and discussion in the academic community and for a wider audience. From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (1991) and the simultaneous founding of the academic journal Voices in Italian Americana created another ongoing forum for literary criticism at this historical moment. 2. Anthony Tamburri’s article includes a two-and-a-half-page appendix titled “Italian/American Literature & Film: Criticism & Biographies,” which lists over fifty texts. 3. The first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) broadened the scope of literature available in anthologies at the time by including “the widest sampling” of work by minority and women writers. Paul Lauter’s introduction claims that the process of selection “represented a re-surveying” of “a new literary world” and “that nothing worthwhile has been omitted; but much that was lost and is excellent has been found” (“To” xxxviii). Currently, in the seventh edition, published in 2014, there are four Italian American writers included in the table of contents according to the Cengage website: Pietro Di Donato, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Don DeLillo, and Alison Bechdel (Heath). 4. See Katharine Newman for the political nature of MELUS’s mission to recover and publish about “lost” texts (100-01). 5. Universal standards for what is or is not of aesthetic value have been continually challenged. See Gregory S. Jay for an extensive discussion of how the debate between aesthetic values and social relevance transpired in the 1990s. 6. See Gerald Graff for his discussion of teaching the conflicts. 7. While Helen Barolini does not confirm whether she attended the panel, she cites the Authors’ Guild Bulletin, a newsletter that functions similarly to a community-based communication. 8. In 1986, the first Wilson Index became available in an electronic format; previous to that time, a researcher would have had to rely on the subject keywords chosen and published by the indexing company. With advances in digital keyword searching, a researcher can now combine key terms and phrases to find sources outside of the subjects previously established in the print editions of the indexes. As Barolini describes, the print editions of the indexes used established subject headings and terms, so if the category “Italian American” were not in use, books and authors that might fit that descriptor would be listed under another existing classification. 9. Although Louise DeSalvo writes about her scholarship on Virginia Woolf and not Italian American literature, her highly influential essay “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar” has deep parallels to Fred L. Gardaphé’s description of his search for texts and academic identity. DeSalvo also describes the obstacles and inspirations that her Italian American ethnicity posed for her academic identity. Originally published in Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women (1984), Barolini excerpted DeSalvo’s essay in The Dream Book. 10. In the essay written to introduce his collection of book reviews titled Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer (1996), Gardaphé essentially dismisses Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) by writing, “Italian/American literature began the moment an Italian immigrant wrote in reaction to life in America. . . . Italian/American literature then is the result of what happened when those dagoes began to read. And finally the necessary criticism and histories will appear only when dagoes read other dagoes” (10). 11. Gian Pagnucci outlines the obstacles and consequences that graduate students and professors face when they use narrative storytelling in dissertations and peer-reviewed articles. He describes the hierarchical valuing of argumentative writing over narrative writing as an ideological belief that has been naturalized as fact. He writes: “Given the pervasiveness of anti-narrative views, then, choosing to adopt a narrative ideology engages one in a struggle with the status quo, puts one at odds with one’s department, one’s university, even society” (46). 12. According to Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, the power of the “we” subject position “affirms the privileges of membership” and can omit “vivid senses of exclusion” (“Politics” 140). 13. Ironically, one of the sections of Tony Ardizzone’s novel that Gardaphé discusses is the tale of Luigi Girgenti called “The Wolf of Girgenti,” in which Luigi, who is underfed in his father’s house, leaves to live in the hills and mountains with a group of bandits. When he joins in with the gang, in Ardizzone’s folktale, he is transformed into a wolf. Gardaphé reads the wolf as a metaphor for a gangster: “Wolfs are often used to symbolize characteristics associated with the gangster: loyalty, success, perseverance, intuition, independence, thought, intelligence, and the shadow” (“Fresh” 165). 14. See Pagnucci for a description of what he calls “anti-narrative” policies practiced by academic journals and tenure committees (13-22). Vitriolic dismissals such as David Gorman’s review of H. Aram Veeser’s anthology Confessions of the Critics: North American Critics’ Autobiographical Moves (1996) illustrate the simplistic rejection of the use of narrative. Gorman writes: If there were anything more to Confessional Critical writing than self-exposure masquerading as “transgression” of disciplinary codes, the result might be interesting; but, to judge by most of the work collected by Veeser, all there is to Personal Criticism is this routinized stylistic device.  Though there remains no convincing justification for Personal Criticism, there is certainly plenty of motivation for it, as some of the more reflective contributions to this volume attest. There are self-serving, self-deceiving, and (let me say it) self-indulgent motives in evidence in a number of the essays. (221-22) Regardless of how the individual essays use or misuse personal storytelling, Gorman dismisses the included stories as a style device with no value. 15. 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TI - Metaphors, Mamma, and Meatballs: Personal Storytelling in the Criticism of Italian American Literature
JO - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlx083
DA - 2018-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/metaphors-mamma-and-meatballs-personal-storytelling-in-the-criticism-NhpJdGkH0h
SP - 134
VL - 43
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -