Edvige Giunta – författare

Mary Cappello, Louise DeSalvo, Sandra M. Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Carole Maso, Agnes Rossi. These are some of the best-known Italian American writers today. They are part of a literary tradition with mid-twentieth century roots that began to develop, in earnest, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During those decades, a number of Italian American women, such as Helen Barolini, began to publish books that depicted their perspectives on life through the critical lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. At the end of the twentieth century, this literature finally blossomed into a fully fledged cultural movement that also took into account issues of sexuality, age, illness, and familial and societal abuse. Writing with an Accent takes a look at this vibrant literary movement by discussing those first writers of the 1970s and 1980s as well as later authors. At the center of Edvige Giunta s Writing with an Accent is the literal notion of accent, the marker of linguistic and cultural difference that separates and identifies recent immigrants to the United States. In this study, an accent symbolically embodies the differences and creative strategies through which contemporary Italian American women writers engage Italian American culture in works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Giunta also looks at the links between the literature and art, music, film, and video produced by contemporary Italian American women. The literature of the Italian American women in Writing with an Accent is shaped by the complicated connections these authors maintain with their cultural origins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by their feminist consciousness and politicized sense of ethnic identity. Writing with an Accent celebrates and explores a group of authors who characteristically mix the joy and pain of Italian American life to paint a multifaceted picture of Italian American women and their complex place in U.S. culture.

This anthology gathers fiction, poetry, memoirs, oral histories, and journalistic pieces by some of the best writers to chronicle the Italian American experience in the Garden State. These works focus on ethnic identity and the distinctive culture of New Jersey, which has long been home to a large and vital Italian American community.Filled with passion, humor, and grace, these writings depict a variety of experiences, including poignant but failed attempts at conformity and the alienation often felt by ethnic Americans. The authors also speak of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities and the realization that it is often the appreciation of their heritage that helps them to succeed. Although presented from the vantage point of only one ethnic group, this book addresses in microcosm the complexities of American identity, depicting situations and conveying emotions that will resonate with people of all immigrant ancestries.Among the many writers featured are Gay Talese, Bill Ervolino, Tom Perrotta, Louise DeSalvo, Carole Mazo, Diane di Prima, and Maria Laurino. Each of the contributors provides a fresh perspective on the diversity, complexity, and richness of the Italian American experience.Publication of this book is made possible in part by a grant from the Institute of Italian and Italian American Heritage Studies, State of New Jersey.

A lucid view of one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Louise DeSalvo.Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship.Personal Effects examines DeSalvo's memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo's memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.

A lucid view of one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Louise DeSalvo.Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship.Personal Effects examines DeSalvo's memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo's memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.

Mary Cappello, Louise DeSalvo, Sandra M. Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Carole Maso, Agnes Rossi. These are some of the best-known Italian American writers today. They are part of a literary tradition with mid-twentieth century roots that began to develop, in earnest, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During those decades, a number of Italian American women, such as Helen Barolini, began to publish books that depicted their perspectives on life through the critical lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. At the end of the twentieth century, this literature finally blossomed into a fully fledged cultural movement that also took into account issues of sexuality, age, illness, and familial and societal abuse. Writing with an Accent takes a look at this vibrant literary movement by discussing those first writers of the 1970s and 1980s as well as later authors. At the center of Edvige Giunta s Writing with an Accent is the literal notion of accent, the marker of linguistic and cultural difference that separates and identifies recent immigrants to the United States. In this study, an accent symbolically embodies the differences and creative strategies through which contemporary Italian American women writers engage Italian American culture in works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Giunta also looks at the links between the literature and art, music, film, and video produced by contemporary Italian American women. The literature of the Italian American women in Writing with an Accent is shaped by the complicated connections these authors maintain with their cultural origins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by their feminist consciousness and politicized sense of ethnic identity. Writing with an Accent celebrates and explores a group of authors who characteristically mix the joy and pain of Italian American life to paint a multifaceted picture of Italian American women and their complex place in U.S. culture.

For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants.

Italian American studies has long been in conversation with American culture at large and is increasingly present in American universities and colleges. Yet once-celebrated works, such as Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, have slipped from the public consciousness, and many scholars fear that representations of Italian Americans in popular culture, as in The Godfather films and the television series The Sopranos, have obscured genuine historical inquiry and understanding. This volume aims to foster a deeper and more complex appreciation for the importance of Italian American texts in the study of American culture. The editors open the volume by outlining the history of Italians in the United States and exploring the potential of literature and the arts to enable the recovery of a forgotten, even repressed, historical past. Over thirty scholars and teachers then present innovative ways of teaching Italian American texts and integrating them with other texts in courses ranging from American literature and history to multiethnic and women’s studies. Contributors discuss Italian American fiction, poetry, memoir, oral history, and theater and performance. A section on film and television provides an overview of popular as well as lesser-known works and interrogates the stereotyped portrayals of Italian Americans. Other contributors offer historical and interdisciplinary approaches to Italian American texts that revolve around themes of race and gender politics, work and social class, and historical intersections. The volume concludes with a review of anthologies that can be used in teaching Italian American studies.

Candid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as "waists." The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The Asch Building had been considered a modern fireproof structure, but inadequate fire safety regulations left the workers inside unprotected. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. A powerful collection of diverse voices, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors from across the globe speak of a singular event with remarkable impact. One hundred and eleven years after the tragic incident, Talking to the Girls articulates a story of contemporary global relevance and stands as an act of collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims.

Candid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as "waists." The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The Asch Building had been considered a modern fireproof structure, but inadequate fire safety regulations left the workers inside unprotected. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. A powerful collection of diverse voices, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors from across the globe speak of a singular event with remarkable impact. One hundred and eleven years after the tragic incident, Talking to the Girls articulates a story of contemporary global relevance and stands as an act of collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims.

For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants.

"A vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories . . . that defines today''s female Italian-American experience" (Publishers Weekly). Often stereotyped as nurturing others through food, Italian-American women have often struggled against this simplistic image to express the realities of their lives. In this unique collection, over 50 Italian-American female writers speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memories rooted in experiences of food, they dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir. This collection also delves into unexpected, sometimes shocking terrain as these courageous authors bear witness to aspects of the Italian American experience that normally go unspoken—mental illness, family violence, incest, drug addiction, AIDS, and environmental degradation. As provocative as it is appetizing, "this collection of verse and prose pieces . . . reveals the evocative and provocative power of food as event and as symbol, as well as the diversity of these women''s lives and their ambivalence regarding the role of nurturer" (Library Journal).