AISNA NEWSLETTER #54-55

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 1
AISNA NEWSLETTER #54-55
American Studies in Italy
Contents
Published by the Italian Association for North American Studies
Associate Member of European Association for American Studies
Issue # 54-55: June-September 2004
A Letter from the President
Massimo Bacigalupo
A Letter from the EAAS President
Marc Chénetier
Upcoming Events
Recent Events
U.S. Embassy: Office of Public Affairs
Fulbright Scholars in Italy
Charles Henry, Glenna Mathews, Donna Perry, Torrey S. Whitman
Conference Participation
Paola Boi, Giorgio Mariani, Roberto Birindelli, Renzo S. Crivelli, John Paul Russo, Sabrina Velucci, Mario Maffi, Lina Unali, Maria Cristina Iuli,
Michele Bottalico, Massimo Bacigalupo, Elisabetta Marino, Mena Mitrano, Elèna Mortara
Notebook
Associations and Scholarly Societies
Journals
Retrospect: AISNA Biennial Conference 2003
Tiziano Bonazzi, Bart Eeckhout, Amy Kaplan
Workshop Reports
Members’ Publications
Books Received
Members’ Addresses
In Memoriam
Meanwhile
Genoa04, English and American History, Ted Kooser
AISNA Board
Editors
Massimo Bacigalupo
Stefano Rosso
Mailing Address
Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere - Università degli Studi di Genova - Piazza S. Sabina 2 - 16124 Genova – Italy fax (39-)
010-2095855/2465890 tel. (39-) 010-2099555

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 2
Dear Colleagues:
A Letter from the President
The two major recent conferences—the AISNA Conference (“Ambassadors”) in Rome (November
2003), and the EAAS Conference in Prague (April 2004), were rewarding experiences. There are
many other events this year, and I invite you to check the AISNA Website and its Calendar, which
we try to keep updated. The AISNA Board is planning our next meeting, which will take place on
26 November at the Centro Studi Americani, when a new Board will be elected. We plan to make it
an interesting day also as a scholarly occasion. There will be two lectures in the morning by
distinguished colleagues from abroad (see program below), on the occasion of the Nathaniel
Hawthorne bicentenary. So keep the morning of 26 November free for an exciting session and help
us welcome our colleagues, who will travel from abroad to address us. As usual, the Association
Meeting will take place in the early afternoon. RSA 13 will be available at the Conference. Other
issues will follow as planned. By the way, you will have noticed that the AISNA Conference
Proceedings America Today and America and the Mediterranean have dropped the subtitle “RSA,”
which created the possibility of confusion with the similarly titled association journal. So the latter
can now be referred to simply as RSA: Rivista di Studi Nord Americani (Journal of the Italian
Association for North American Studies) without any risk of a mix-up. We have been mailing the
proceedings of our last Biennial Conferences to members in good standing, together with hard
copies of AISNA Newsletter #53 which we thought would be useful for reference. We plan to
continue to mail hard copies of the Newsletter as occasion offers. Meanwhile, you can always read
it on our website. The present double issue has a new section of Books Received, which is a way of
informing members of publications that have come to the Editors’ attention that may be of interest
to American Studies. We look forward to your suggestions and contributions to the Newsletter and
of course to RSA. The Proceedings of the “Ambassadors” conference are in preparation. The
Members’ Bibliography has been updated on the website, thanks to Clara Bartocci, so do check
your entries for accuracy. With thousands of references, it really shows the extent of work done by
AISNA Members over the last few years.
On the EAAS front, Joseph Jarab ended his fruitful term as President with the Prague Conference.
The new President for 2004-2008, elected by the EAAS Board in Prague, is Marc Chénetier, of
FAAS, and the new Treasurer for the same period is Hans-Jürgen Grabbe of DGFA. We
congratulate Marc and wish him a good term as President. The EAAS Board also discussed the
future of ASE Newsletter and decided “to switch to an electronic version only, which can be
downloaded, printed out, and distributed by national associations to members who require a paper
copy.” The EAAS website is . I encourage you to download the spring and fall
Newsletters, which you will see include relevant information on activities by AISNA and its
members.
Association business apart, you will have noticed that the two principal Italian newspapers have
been promoting poetry. Repubblica published in May a volume of Poesia statunitense, and Corriere
della Sera published one poet every week, from February to September 2004. I have used the
Dickinson and E.L. Masters volumes in class, since they were so easy to obtain, and on the whole
well-produced. Ginsberg and Plath appeared in April, Whitman, Eliot, and Pound hit the
newsstands on 14 June, 5 July and 30 August, respectively. I mention this because the whole series
includes thirty poets, starting with Montale and closing with Dante, and I was pleased to notice that
in the Corriere’s Parnassus there are no less than seven American poets, second only to Italy (with

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 3
nine poets). England and France have three poets each, John Bull being represented by
Shakespeare, Auden and Dylan Thomas. This excellent representation of the American Muse I find
significant since it confirms the enormous influence of American culture even in a field (poetry)
with which it is not usually associated in the general mind. It also suggests that it is high time that
study of English in Italy should be reformulated to give more space to American culture. As for the
series of anthologies produced by La Repubblica, W.H. Auden is strangely absent from both the
English and U.S. volumes: not because he has fallen between two stools but apparently because it
was impossible to get permission to reprint him from his publishers. Cummings and Rich are
missing from the American volume for the same reason, and Elizabeth Bishop is under-represented.
To return to the contentious relation of English and American culture, I refer you to a recent
exchange in the TLS. In a 16 January “Commentary” Patrick Wormald joked that America may not
have “enough history.” Krishnan Kumar of the University of Virginia (author of The Making of
English National Identity, 2003) and Theodore K. Rabb of Princeton joked in turn that “America
might have more history than Great Britain,” since the latter was not created before 1707, “in either
a formal or a substantive sense.” See issues for 16 and 30 January, 13 February, and 5, 12 and 19
March, and the box below.
Meanwhile, have a fine beginning of the academic year, and thank you for your support.
Massimo Bacigalupo
AISNA President
April-September 2004
Program
10.00-13.00
Annual AISNA Meeting
American Narratives 1804-1904
Centro Studi Americani - Rome
26 November 2004
Christopher Benfey
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and American Literature
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts
“His Hard Survivor’s Smile: Hawthorne at 200”
Marc Chénetier
Professor of American Literature, Université Paris 7 -Denis Diderot
President, European Association for American Studies)
“Wordslingers: The Western as Genre in Contemporary American Fiction”
14.00-18.00
AISNA Business Meeting

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 4
Dear colleagues,
A Letter from the EAAS President
Last week-end, the “handover meeting” of EAAS Officers took place in Paris and the new team is
officially in place : Ole Moen and Gulriz Büken remain respectively Secretary-General and Vice-
President of our Association, while Hans-Jürgen Grabbe replaces Hans Bak as Treasurer and I will
try to follow in the footsteps of our previous President Josef Jarab.
On this occasion, I would like to send greetings to all of you and to affirm our determination to
work as closely as possible with the national and joint-national associations that make up EAAS, to
be open to all suggestions that may emanate from them through representatives on the Board of
EAAS, and to do our best to increase the number and quality of EAAS initiatives, particularly as
they concern our younger colleagues. I am convinced the duties of EAAS exceed the organization
of our Biennial Conference, the publication of our Newsletter, that of our collective work, the
funding of research grants and other natural duties duly and actively fulfilled in the past. In
particular, the officers and the Board, I trust, will try their utmost to improve the fund-raising
situation in order to offer more and better opportunities for intellectual networking, mutual
formation, teaching and research collaborations. It goes without saying that suggestions and
contributions of all kinds from your national association will be more than welcome.
EAAS has changed quite a bit since its foundation half a century ago. From the respectable
grouping of a few eminent, mutually co-opted scholars, to a federation of nineteen national and
joint-national associations with democratic structures, it has changed its size, its purposes, its
paradigms, its ambitions, grown from a handful of members to nearly 4800. Built over time to
answer growing needs, it has accompanied and favored the emergence of European viewpoints on
the common object of our work, the realities and culture of the United States, favored the
expression of multiple angles and all critical approaches, rid itself of ideological and personal
agendas, worked steadfastly at the enlargement and enrichment of viewpoints as it integrated new
associations, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe. It intends to keep doing so in the future
and devote what volunteer energies it has to the emergence and promotion of the work and
reflexions of European scholars studying the United States, to the harmonious cooperation of all
existing European national and joint-national associations.
As the new team of EAAS officers assumes its mandate in this spirit, I wanted to send you, and the
Board and members, of your association its most cordial greetings and tell you we look forward to
what work we shall prove able to do together.
Yours sincerely,
Marc Chénetier
President of the European Association for American Studies
30 rue Pouchet
75017 Paris
Tel/fax : 01 48 56 15 54
e-mail : chenetier[at]eaas.info

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 5
Upcoming Events
and Calls for Papers
8 October-7 December 2004. “Gondola days”: Isabella Stewart Gardner e il suo mondo a
Palazzo Barbaro-Curtis. Venezia, Sale Monumentali della Biblioteca Marciana, Libreria
Sansoviniana. Palazzo Barbaro, il magnifico edificio che sorge sul Canal Grande a Venezia, vicino
al Ponte dell’Accademia, è la fonte d’ispirazione per la mostra. Per secoli dimora di una illustre
famiglia veneziana, il palazzo - come tanti altri in quell’epoca - fu venduto nell’Ottocento a
speculatori e passò di mano in mano, spogliato di parte dei quadri famosi che lo ornavano. Chi
salvò il palazzo dalla rovina fu una coppia di Boston, Daniel Sargent Curtis e Ariana Wormeley
Curtis che, il 3 dicembre 1885, lo acquistarono dopo avervi abitato come inquilini dal 1881. Insieme
al figlio Ralph, pittore, essi ne fecero un centro di vita artistica e intellettuale: lo frequentavano
artisti e scrittori americani ed europei tra i quali John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler,
Anders Zorn, Henry James, Robert Browning e più tardi Claude Monet. John Singer Sargent
dipingeva nello studio dell’amico Ralph Curtis e vi eseguì il dipinto A Venetian Interior che ritrae i
proprietari. Henry James fu spesso ospite a Palazzo Barbaro e vi ambientò il romanzo The Wings of
the Dove. Gondola days è il titolo di un libretto di saggi su Venezia del pittore F. Hopkinson Smith,
anch’egli parte del gruppo. Dal 1884, Isabella Stewart Gardner animò questa vivace cerchia di
artisti, scrittori, mecenati e musicisti europei e americani che lì si riunivano. La sontuosa eleganza
degli interni e la raffinata architettura del palazzo ebbero grande influenza su Isabella, che assieme
al marito - Jack Gardner -lo prendeva in affitto durante le frequenti visite a Venezia e che al palazzo
si ispirò, un secolo fa, per la creazione del suo personale museo, il palazzo in stile veneziano di
Boston, noto come Fenway Court. La mostra mette in luce l’intensa vita artistica ed intellettuale
della cerchia di Palazzo Barbaro e l’influenza da essa esercitata, alla fine dell’Ottocento, sull’arte, la
letteratura, l’architettura del tempo. A questo scopo riunisce una significativa scelta di dipinti,
acquerelli, pastelli, stampe e disegni, fotografie, lettere ed altre testimonianze di visitatori e ospiti.
Ufficio Stampa: Annalisa Bruni - Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana - Tel. 041-2407241, fax:
041.5238803, e-mail: bruni[at]marciana.venezia.sbn.it .
25-26 October 2004. Sea Changes: Bodies, Practices and Discourses across the Atlantic.
Palazzo Bo, Università di Padova. Si tratta del primo incontro dedicato alla migrazione e
trasformazione di pratiche, testi e discorsi fra Europa, Africa e Americhe nel contesto di un progetto
di ricerca multi-disciplinare che si intitola "Politiche dell'identità, diritti cosmopolitici e comunità
locali nel contesto circum-atlantico". Per ulteriori informazioni, si prega di contattare Anna Scacchi
(ascacchi[at]alfanet.it).
28-29 October 2004. Fifth Forum for the Study of the Literary Cultures of the Southwest.
Firenze, Sala del Consiglio della Presidenza, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Piazza Brunelleschi 3.
Information: socerlet[at]unifi.it (attn. G. Prampolini).
8-9 November 2004. Transnational American Studies and New Comparative Literary Studies.
Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Palazzo Du Mesnil, via Chiatamone 61-62.
Speakers: Cristina Giorcelli, Djelal Kadir, Alessandro Portelli, Gordon Poole, Fiorenzo Iuliano,
Remo Ceserani, Mario Corona, Mara De Chiara, Serena Fusco, Paul Giles, Carlo Martinez, Elena
Spandri, Vincenzo Maggitti, Donatella Izzo.
10 November 2004. Gli Stati Uniti dopo le elezioni presidenziali. Dipartimento di Storia e Storia
dell’arte, Università di Trieste & Centro interuniversitario di Storia e Politica Euro-Americana,

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 6
Trieste, Dipartimento di Storia e Storia dell’arte.
11-12 November 2004. USA Elections 2004: War, Security, Partecipation. Università di
Bergamo and Ácoma, Via Salvecchio 19, Aula 3. November 11, Chair: Giorgio Mariani. Speakers:
Arnaldo Testi, “La costituzione e la bandiera”, Mario Del Pero, “La politica estera statunitense
dopo le elezioni”, Jim Green, “ Society, Democracy, and the Vote”, Ferdinando Fasce, “Vendere il
candidato: il marketing politico”, Fabrizio Tonello, “Come hanno votato gli americani”; November
12: Round Table “Fahrenheit/America: Democrazia, Politica, Partecipazione”: Chair, Stefano
Rosso. Speakers: Fabrizio Tonello, Jim Green, Arnaldo Testi, Mario Del Pero, Oliviero Bergamini,
Massimiliano Guareschi, Bruno Cartosio. (Information: acoma[at]unibg.it ; bruno.cartosio[at]unibg.it ;
stefano.rosso[at]unibg.it)
11-13 November 2004. Networking Women: Trans-European and Circum-Atlantic
Connections. Sala Conferenze dell’Archivio di Stato, Viale Giovine Italia 6, Firenze.
Speakers: Marina Camboni, Gigliola Sacerdoti Mariani , Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Ilaria Sborgi,
Valerio Massimo De Angelis, Cinzia Biagiotti, Leela Gandhi, Paola Zaccaria, Leela Gandhi, Joan
Anim-Addo, Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, Giovanna Covi, Diana Collecott, Alison J. Donnell, Carla
Sassi, Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli, Maria Susanna Garroni, Daniele Fiorentino, Daniela Rossini,
Francesca Ditifeci, Valeria Simone, Susan Stanford Friedman, Anna D’Elia, Ernestina Pellegrini,
Antonella Gargano, Carla Scura, Francesca De Ruggieri, Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Nando Fasce, Vita
Fortunati, Uta Treder and others. Information: Gigliola Sacerdoti Mariani md2463[at]mclink.it
marina.camboni[at]fastwebnet.it
12-13 November 2004. Leisure and Liberty in North America. Université Paris IV. Information:
pierre.lagayette[at]paris4.sorbonne.fr
26 November 2004. Annual AISNA Meeting. American Narratives 1804-1904.
Centro Studi Americani, Via M. Caetani 32 – Roma.
Henry James thought Hawthorne, exiled in quiet provincial Salem, was doomed to ignore the hard
facts of history and society. What speaks to us now, however, two centuries after his birth, is
precisely Hawthornes insight into national and personal trauma and folly. Hawthorne the harsh
critic of utopian dreams and self-righteous bigotry, Hawthorne the jaundiced witness to the Civil
War, Hawthorne the survivor, as Robert Lowell called him, this is a Hawthorne for 2004. Will the
time ever come again, in America, Hawthorne wrote in 1862, when we may live half a score of
years without once seeing the likeness of a soldier?... Not in this generation, I fear, nor in the next,
nor till the Millennium. - Christopher Benfey
Program
10.00-13.00. American Narratives 1804-1904
Speakers:
Christopher Benfey
(Mount Holyoke College)
Marc Chénetier
(Paris VII)
14.00-18.00. AISNA Business Meeting
27 November 2004. Reality Revisited: Literature, Communication, Aesthetics at the

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 7
Crossroads.
On behalf of the department faculty, we would like to take this opportunity to invite you to
participate in the University of Indianapolis, Athens Campus, English Department Conference
organized in cooperation with the Communication Department. It is our intention to explore the
branch of philosophy that studies the nature of reality. The objective of the Conference is to
establish an arena for interdisciplinary and comparative research in Philosophy, Literature and
Communication studies. We have initiated a series of seminars and conferences promoting the study
of ontology, and in the 20 th century there came to be an ontology of communication and of artworks
in which the ontology of literary artworks had its own place. Recent years have seen notions of
Reality discussed by several disciplines. We are interested in how notions of Reality are affected
by, and continue to affect aesthetic practice in the fields of arts, design, literature language, literary
criticism and media production. The Conference will provide a forum for the sharing and
understanding the aesthetics of reality of literature, language, mass media; the particular manner of
their existence, the field of inquiry that they belong to and which can be described as the reality of
artworks and communication. The conference will give the opportunity to understand the complex
relation between literature, communication and philosophy which becomes very important to global
societies. As members of the educational and professional community, your participation is
important to us. For further information please contact us at michaelidiss[at]uindy.gr or
karamanist[at]uindy.gr- Susie Michailidis, Theomary Karamanis
8-27 February 2005. Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf? A new production of Edward Albee’s play,
directed by Gabriele Lavia, starring Lavia and Mariangela Melato. Teatro di Genova. www.teatrodi-genova.it.
Information: 010-5342222.
HCA Spring Academy 2005: “American History, Culture, and Politics.” The Heidelberg Center
for American Studies (HCA) invites proposals for its Spring Academy on American History,
Culture, and Politics, which will take place from February 2005 at the University of Heidelberg,
Germany. The Spring Academy aims at establishing a European network of advanced
graduate and Ph.D. students specializing in the fields of American History, Culture, and Politics,
particularly aspiring to facilitate the insights that can be generated by cross-disciplinary dialogue.
From Fall 2004/05 onwards the University of Heidelberg offers a full-time, one-year taught M.A. in
American Studies at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA). For further information on
applying, scholarships and tuition fees, please contact Christiane.Roesch[at]uni-hd.de or see our
hompage: www.hca.uni-hd.de
11-13 April 2005. 26th American Indian Workshop. Amerika Haus, Munich.
For more information see webpage:
www.amerikahaus.de/program/events/AIW26
17-29 May 2005. FAAS Conference, Lille. The next annual conference of the French Association
for American Studies will take place in Lille from May 27 to May 29, 2005. This conference has
been planned without a specific theme to allow for all specialists in American studieswhether in
literature or social sciences humanitiesto feel free to present their current and innovative research.
The conference organizers will create workshops according to themes or disciplines, so as to allow
participants to share both their methodological and topical concerns.
25-28 May 2005. The 2005 Nordic Association for American Studies Conference. Vaxjo
University, Sweden. e-mail: gunlog.fur[at]hum.vxu.se
10, 12, 14, 17 & 19 June 2005. Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten. Teatro Carlo Felice, Genova. A
rare opportunity to see Britten’s and E.M.Forster’s adaptation of Melville’s short novel (Wiener

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 8
Staatsoper production). Information: 010.5381.226/227.
22-26 June 2005. Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: A Sesquicentennial Celebration.
Held in New Bedford on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of both
Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and Melville’s Benito Cereno, this conference will
examine the works, lives, and contexts of these two prodigious, encyclopedic writers who spanned
most of the nineteenth century. Additional information on the conference may be found on the New
Bedford Whaling Museum website: http://whalingmuseum.org
27-29 June 2005. International Conference on Storytelling and Cultural Identity. Terceira,
Azores (Portugal). Visit the conference web page for details: www.cm-ah.pt/ccc
4-7 July 2005. 21 st Ezra Pound International Conference . Ezra Pound, Language and
Persona. Rapallo, Italy. Language and Persona (or Mask) are at the center of Ezra Pound’s work.
The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, the Chinese Exile, Propertius, and Confucius, are only a few of his
major masks. (“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,” as Oscar Wilde famously put it.)
Pound also gave voice to many goddesses and women, ancient and modern, introducing aspects of
language and gender. Other masks are his parodies of style, from the vernacular to the Biblical, and
his tireless exploration of languages, Western and Eastern. His heroes could be called “men made
out of words.” Papers should be timed for 30 minutes delivery and 15 minutes discussion. Anyone
interested, with or without a proposal, should write to the Conference Secretary: William Pratt,
Department of English, Miami University, Oxford OH 45056 USA.
Email address:
12-15 July 2005. Traces of Henry James: An International Conference of the Henry James
Society. Venice International University, Isola di San Servolo, Venice, Italy. 2-page abstracts
(maximum) and 2-page CVs (maximum) on any aspect of Henry James studies. Proposals relating
to James’s Venice, James’s legacy, and the like, are especially welcome. Panel proposals are also
encouraged. Deadline: 15 December, 2004. Submission and inquiries to: Greg Zacahrias, Center for
Henry James Studies, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA 68178. gwzach[at]creigthon.edu. In
collaboration with the Department of Anglo-American Studies, University of Venice.
18-22 August 2005. The next world congress of IASA (International Association for American
Studies) will take place at the University of Ottawa, Canada, 18-22 August 2005. Several AISNA
Members will give papers. Please visit the IASA web site: http://www.iasaweb.org for further
information.
8-9 September 2005. Defeat and Memory. University of Edinburgh.
Email: jenny.macleod[at]ed.ac.uk
20-23 October 2005. (Re)Constructing Pain and Joy in Language, Literature and Culture.
The 6th International Conference of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE),
University of Athens, October 20-23, 2005. Drawing upon the debate on representing vs.
(re)constructing reality through language and literature, the conference aims to explore views in
relation to the treatment of ‘joy’ and ‘pain’ as human experiences combining physical,
psychological, private, public, conceptual and cultural dimensions. Furthermore, it fosters work
that addresses the relationship between pain/joy and creativity, examining the extent to which
pain/joy may be seen as sterile and constrictive or creative and expansive. Proposals for 20-min
papers (title, 300-word abstract, 100-word bionote) by 10 January 2005 to Angeliki Tzanne
, Faculty of English Studies, Universit y of Athens, Panepistimioupoli
Zographou, Athens 157 84, Greece. Tel. +30 210 7277913; fax: +30 210 7277020.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 9
Recent Events
Sergio Perosa became Professor Emeritus of Università di Venezia in November 2003.
Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli was nominated Emeritus Professor of Università di Roma III in
March 2004. In turn, Claudio Gorlier was made Professor Emeritus of Univesità di Torino. The
AISNA President and Board congratulate their distinguished colleagues for these honors, which
reflect on the discipline of American Studies in Italy.
Simone Cinotto won the David Thelen Prize 2004 from the Organization of American Historians
for the best essay in American history in a foreign language. His essay “Leonard Covello, la
Collezione Covello e la storia alimentare degli immigrati italiani di New York” (Quaderni Storici
2, 2002) will be published in English on The Journal of American History.
26 April 2004. Europa - Stati Uniti: le discontinuità di un rapporto. Quarta Giornata di Studi
“L’immaginazione dell’Occidente.” Organized by Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di
Bologna; Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia; Centro interuniversitario di Storia e Politica
Euro-Americana. Papers given: Pierre Hassner (Institut d’Études Politiques, Paris), “The West:
How Many Divisions?”; Gaetano Quagliariello (LUISS “Guido Carli”, Roma) “Non solo 1989:
svolte e continuità nei rapporti transatlantici del Secondo Dopoguerra”; Marta Dassù (Aspen
Institute Roma), “Come concepire un nuovo accordo transatlantico”; Angelo Panebianco
(Università di Bologna), “Le conseguenze dell’integrazione europea sui rapporti transatlantici”;
John Harper (Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center), “Visione americana dell’Europa e del
Mondo”; Federico Romero (Università di Firenze), “Dalla convergenza alla divaricazione:
l’America nell’immaginario dell’Europa occidentale.”
17 May 2004. Corpo pubblico - Corpo privato. Riflessioni sull’identità culturale in Europa e
negli Stati Uniti d’America. Sala Conferenze University of California, Bologna. Organized by
Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna – ACUME: Cultural Memory in European Countries
- Dipartimento di Politica. Istituzioni. Storia - Centro Interuniversitario di storia e politica euroamericana
- Centro di studi americani ed euro-americani “Piero Bairati” - University of California
Education Abroad Program. A seminar to mark the publication of Public and Private in American
History edited by R. Baritono, D. Frezza, A. Lorini, M. Vaudagna, E. Vezzosi (Torino: Otto
editore, 2003). Speakers: Ellen DuBois (UCLA), “The Gendered Nature of Leadership: The Case
of American Suffragism”; Franco La Polla, “L’Americanità del cinema americano”; Vita Fortunati,
“Memoria pubblica e memoria privata nell’identità europea del Novecento”; Sara Pesce,
“L’immagine pubblica dei moguls di Hollywood. Il caso di Harry Cohn”; Giovanna Franci,
“Spazio urbano e identità: il caso di downtown Los Angeles”; Franco Minganti, “Da
‘pubblico/privato’ a ‘questioni di soggettività’: l'anello mancante”; Elena Lamberti, “Spazio
pubblico e spazio privato: il genius loci tra USA, Europa e globalizzazione.”
21 May 2004. Voci dagli Stati Uniti: Prosa & poesia & teatro del Secondo Novecento, edited by
Caterina Ricciardi and Valerio Massimo De Angelis (Roma: Editrice La Sapienza, 2004) was
presented at Centro Studi Americani, Rome, by Benedetta Bini and Donatella Izzo.
From 8 May to 18 July 2004 the Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo, Varese,
hosted the exhibit “The Prairie Schoolhouses: The American West between Memory and
Default.” 40 b/w photos from University of New Mexico anthropologist John Martin Campbell

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 10
organized by the Dipartimento di Storia della Società e delle Istituzioni of the University of Milan.
The plates depict the schoolhouses, diplomas, playground equipment, teaching aids, and housing
quarters, also chronicling the rise and ruin of these schoolhouses, most of which are now gone. The
exhibition travelled to Centro Studi Americani, Rome, where it will be open from 30 September
to 4 November.
24 May 2004. Genova per noi. Testimonianze di scrittori contemporanei was presented at
Biblioteca Berio, Genova, by Michel David and Franco Croce. Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo,
Stefano Verdino and others, it is a collection of poems and essays related to Genoa (2004 European
Capital of Culture) by sixty-four writers. Contributors include: Robert Creeley, Mary de
Rachewiltz, Philip Levine, J.D. McClatchy, Czeslaw Milosz, Wayne Pounds, and Mary Jo Salter.
Copies of the volume can be obtained from the publisher, Accademia Ligure di Scienze e Lettere,
Palazzo Ducale, 16100 Genova.
27 May 2004. At the Centro Studi Americani in Roma, Nello Barile, Paola Colaiacomo,
Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli presented Abito e Identità. Ricerche di Storia Letteraria e
Culturale, vol. V, ed. by Cristina Giorcelli (Palermo: Ila Palma, 2004).
4 June 2004. At the University of Bergamo, Marilyn B. Young (New York University) gave a
paper on “Imperial Language.” The Paper will appear in Italian in the monographic section on
“Farenheit America“ in Ácoma n. 28 (October 2004).
15 & 30 June 2004. The Centro Studi Euro Atlantici of Università di Genova organized a
symposium on: “Ocean of Sounds. Migration, music, and races in the making of Euro-Atlantic
Societies.”
On 18-19 June 2004 the University of Urbino hosted the Conference on “Il concetto di dignità
nella cultura occidentale / The Concept of Dignity in Western Culture.” It was organized by the
Facoltà di Lingue Straniere and the Facoltà di Giurisprudenza.
On 20 June 2004 poet Yusef Komunyakaa read from his work at the Festival Internazionale di
Poesia di Genova. He was introduced by AISNA Member Antonella Francini, editor of an Italian
collection of his work, Il ritmo delle emozioni. Komunyakaa is familiar to AISNA members, since
his poetry was praised by Josef Jarab, EAAS President, in a lecture given in the Siracusa conference
“America Today.”
In August 2004 poet Ezra Pound was commemorated with a blue plaque outside the London house
on Kensington Church Walk where he lived from 1909 to 1914. It was unveiled by his daughter
Mary de Rachewiltz. That Pound remains controversial was shown by the fact that on 31 August
2004 Corriere della Sera published The Pisan Cantos (as part of its poetry series) without the usual
introduction. Excerpts from the intended introduction, written by Gianni Riotta, and vetoed by the
Pound Estate, appeared in the Corriere for 30 August 2004.
Ted Kooser, a retired insurance executive and a visiting professor in the English Department in the
University of Nebraska, is the new U.S. poet laureate for 2004-2005. Of the appointement, the
Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, said: “Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and
small town America and the first poet laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches
beyond its native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways.” Mr. Kooser will take
over the position from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise E. Glück, 60, who is a writer in
residence at Yale University, on October 7, with a reading of his work.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 11
17-19 September 2004. The Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference at Columbia University and
Barnard College brought together an international group of scholars, poets, and students to celebrate
the work of poet and Columbia alumnus Louis Zukofsky. Co-sponsored by Michael Golston,
Assistant Professor of English at Columbia, and Serge Gavronsky, Professor of French at Barnard,
the Centennial Conference was the largest scholarly conference ever devoted solely to the work and
life of Louis Zukofsky.
4 October 2004. A round table discussion on La scena italoamericana: cinema, radio e
letteratura della comunità italiana in Nord America, with Giuliana Muscio, Stefano Luconi and
Martino Marazzi, was devoted to the volume Piccole Italie, grandi schermi (Roma: Bulzoni, 2004).
It was organized by the Master in Transatlantic Studies of the Universities of Padova and
Birmingham at Padova, Aula Nievo, Palazzo del Bo. Rare audiovisual materials on the Italian
American scene were presented.
7-9 October 2004. The City and the Sea—from Liguria to the World was the title of a
conference that took place in Imperia, under the patronage of AISNA. Elmar Schenkel from Leipzig
and Matthew Rice from Clemson were among the speakers.
12 October 2004. Le prospettive delle elezioni presidenziali negli USA. Organized by Centro
Studi Americani and Centro Interuniversitario di Storia e Politica Euro-Americana.
4-7 November 2004. 38 th Conference of American Italian Historical Association, Annapolis,
Maryland. Lina Unali chaired a workshop on “Psychoanalytic and Psychological Considerations on
Italy and the Italian Experience.” Contributions were by Unali and AISNA members Elisabetta
Marino and Franco Mulas; other papers were read by Maria Paola Malva, who is completing her
doctorate at the University of Sassari, Rob Marchesani and Louisa Calio. A regular attendant at the
AIHA Conference, Unali notes that due to the great efforts of the organizers and of the high level
of the papers the Annapolis meeting was a notable success
AISNA Website
This is the web site of A.I.S.N.A.: . It includes a Calendar of Forthcoming Events,
and links to American Studies Sites and to AISNA publications. Please check your data and send
comments to the AISNA President and Treasurer. To access Members’ addresses use the following
codes. User: AISNA2002; Password: aisna2002.
AISNA Bibliography
The Bibliography of AISNA members from 1998-2004 is posted on the AISNA website. Please
check your entries for omissions and lacunae (e.g. some contributions to journals and Festschriften
lack numbers of pages). All corrections and additions should be sent to Clara Bartocci
and will be very welcome. Thank you for helping us make this bibliography a
useful and searchable tool. And thanks to Clara Bartocci for kindly undertaking this project.
AISNA Publications
America Today. The Proceedings of the 1999 AISNA Conference in Siracusa, edited by Gigliola

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 12
Nocera, have been mailed to members in good standing, together with the complimentary issue of
EJAC 22.3 (2003)–see below. Please advise the Treasurer, Gabriella Ferruggia, if you have not
received your copy.
Ambassadors. American Studies in a Changing World. Panelists are invited to send their papers
to workshop chairs by 30 September 2004. Workshop coordinators will edit the contributions,
check their conformity to guidelines, and send them to Massimo Bacigalupo.
RSA/Rivista di Studi Nord Americani
RSA #13 is largely devoted to “The Theme of Destruction in American Culture.” Articles are by
Siniscalco, Serrai, Rossi, Clericuzio, Del Pero, Zaccaria, Bisutti and Rubeo. Tedeschini Lalli
presents an autograph text by Romaine Brooks. Members of AISNA (and EAAS) who would like to
receive back issues of RSA Journal or need extra copies should write to the AISNA Secretary
and/or Treasurer.
The RSA Board has worked on the new editorial plan and on the next four issues of the journal,
which will include both a monographic section and a general section. All AISNA members are
invited to cooperate by submitting articles and review essays in order to make RSA representative of
American studies in Italy. Cooperation is also needed to find unpublished texts (poetry, fiction,
documents etc.). Articles should be written in English, according to the latest MLA style sheet.
Proposals and articles for the monographic section should be sent to the Guest Editor, while those
for the general section should be sent to all members of the Editorial Board.
Next issues:
#14 “Poetry and History.” Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo, enquiries to 7237[at]unige.it.
#15 “American Constructions of Europe.” Edited by Tiziano Bonazzi, enquiries to
bonazzit[at]spbo.unibo.it.
Call for Papers
RSA-Rivista di Studi Nord Americani # 16
“American Spaces – Horizontal and Vertical”
I am vertical
But I would rather be horizontal
Sylvia Plath (1961)
From the very beginning, concepts of space are deeply embedded in American culture – and this is especially true of
such concepts as “verticality” and “horizontality”, which often take on complex and contradictory ideological meanings
and implications. This issue of RSA plans to explore such meanings and implications, with a wide range of points of
view (literary, historical, sociological, artistic). The deadline for submitting proposals is now postponed to 15
November 2004.
Write to: mario.maffi[at]unimi.it .
EAAS

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 13
The May 2004 and September 2004 issues of the EAAS Newsletter are available on line on the web
page of EAAS (www.eaas.info). Newsletter 53 contains, among other things, all the necessary
information relative to the proposals for workshops and lectures at the 2006 Conference.
U.S. Embassy: Office of Public Affairs
Anne Callaghan, director of Public Affairs at the Embassy of the United States, left her position in
Rome in June 2004. Anne has been very supportive of AISNA initiatives and was thanked by
AISNA President on behalf of the Association. We wish her success in her new position in Bogotà,
Colombia, and hope to meet her again at our gatherings. Anne’s position will be taken by Mark
Smith, to whom we extend a warm welcome.
Thomas F. Skipper, director of Public Affairs at the Consulate General of the United States,
Milano, left his post to return to the Department of State in Washington. Tom was active in
furthering American Studies and made many friends in Italy. His successor as Public Affairs
Officer is David A. Bustamante, to whom AISNA extends its welcome.
Fulbright Scholars in Italy
Charles P. Henry
Professor, Department of African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley
University of Bologna
It was my great pleasure to serve as the Distinguished Fulbright Chair of American History and
Politics at the University of Bologna during the Spring term of 2003. My host was the Department
of Politics, Institutions, and History directed by Professor Tiziano Bonazzi. The warm reception
accorded me by Professor Bonazzi and his colleagues was limited only by my inability to speak
Italian.
On one day a week I taught a course entitled “Human Rights, Martin Luther King, and U.S. Foreign
Policy.” The course was a synthesis of two separate courses I offer at my home institution, the
University of California at Berkeley. As I expected, there was a great deal of interest in U.S. foreign
policy given the unfolding of events in Iraq. The perspectives of my Italian students were enriched
by the participation of three exchange students in the class. Overall, however, I found it
significantly more difficult to generate class discussions than at Berkeley. No doubt this was due in
part to the fact that the course was conducted in English.
I had the opportunity to give guest lectures in another class at the University of Bologna as well as
the University of Denver education abroad program. The United States embassy arranged two
lectures for me in Sicily at the main campus of the University of Catania and at its branch campus
in Ragusa. I found the graduate students in political studies at Catania to be very knowledgeable
about U.S. foreign policy and we had a rich question and answer session after my talk.
My wife and I took advantage of Italy’s excellent transportation system to visit as many historic
sites as possible. It was a great privilege to be associated with the venerable University of Bologna
and we look forward to staying in touch with our new friends and returning for a visit in the future.
Charles Henry

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 14
Glenna Matthews
Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Fulbright Senior Specialist, Università di Genova, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche
Coming from the University of California, Berkeley, where I am a research associate at the Institute
of Urban and Regional Development, I was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Genoa for the first two
weeks of May 2004. In that capacity I taught three classes about American women’s history to
students at the University of Genoa, spoke at a seminar for members of the faculty about my new
book, “Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream,” appeared as part of a panel discussion
on equal opportunities for women in the US and Italy sponsored by the Region of Liguria, and
addressed two women’s clubs. Thus, though my time was short, I did meet a number of diverse
people and discuss a multitude of subjects. I also took the opportunity to explore the city during my
off-duty hours. I hardly qualify as an expert, but I do have a number of observations on the basis of
my trip.
As I learned in Genoa, many Fulbrighters to that wonderful city have been students of the American
South. I, on the other hand, am a scholar of California history as well as of American women’s
history. As a Californianist, I was much struck by the affinities between Genoa and San Francisco,
as well as between the Bay Area and Liguria.
In the first place, though there are obvious differences between the regions on the basis of history
and culture, one overpowering resemblance is in landscape. There can be few places on earth so
beautiful as the Italian Riviera, with Genoa as its metropolis, and the Bay Area, with San Francisco
as its crown jewel. I can only speculate about how the many 19th-century Ligurian immigrants to
San Francisco must have felt when they arrived in an area that had to have reminded them of home.
No wonder such a large number chose the City by the Bay as their home in the New World.
Both cities are situated in agricultural areas of some importance. In Liguria the crops have been
olives and flowers. And in the Bay Area, until high tech replaced the fruit-growing and -processing,
Italian immigrants (and those from other places in southern Europe) helped develop a horticultural
industry of great economic consequence. Having studied the Santa Clara Valley (now Silicon
Valley) for several decades, I am very aware of the role played by Italian immigrants there. Though
the growers themselves were not necessarily Ligurian, in fact, Ligurian immigrant capital played a
very significant role in developing the fruit industry. This owed to the fact that the Ligurian
immigrant Marco Fontana founded what would become Del Monte Fruit and another Ligurian
immigrant, Amadeo P. Giannini, founded the Bank of Italy, now the giant Bank of America.
Giannini established the first branch of the Bank of Italy located outside the city of San Francisco in
the Santa Clara Valley, where it played a vital role in providing credit to Italian immigrant growers,
thus enabling them to increase their holdings. To cite just one example of the size of the Valley’s
fruit industry, in the mid-20th century somewhere between one third and one half of the world’s
supply of dried prunes came from Santa Clara County alone.
Both Genoa and San Francisco have been major ports, with all that that entails, above all local
economies focusing on trade and finance—to say nothing of the presence of relatively cosmopolitan
populations. Coming from the Bay Area, my eye is used to encountering vast human diversity. I
was struck, on this trip to Genoa, by the number of Asian immigrants I had dealings with, as well as
people from Africa and South America. Indeed, I even saw Spanish signage on the buses,
something I’m very familiar with in California. In sum, I felt very much at home in Genoa.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 15
In the time since I started graduate school at Stanford University in 1970, the scholarship about
California has come of age. At the present time we have a sweeping, multi-volume synthesis of
California history, authored by Kevin Starr, as well as an ever-increasing number of sophisticated
monographs, works which focus on various ethnic groups in California, the state’s agriculture,
urban growth, labor history, environmental history and so on. Courses are offered on the literature
of California. (I might mention that one Genoese told me that his mother rereads John Steinbeck’s
“The Grapes of Wrath” once a year, arguably the greatest California novel). Scholars who
specialize in California now hold positions at prestigious institutions throughout the United States.
I bring all of this up, because I think the time is ripe for more systematic dialogue between scholars
of my region and state and Italian scholars, whether from the University of Genoa or elsewhere. I
know that there recently was an Italian conference on John Steinbeck, and that there have been
conferences on the Mediterranean influence on the United States. Hence the conversation has
started wherein California and Italy might be explored in juxtaposition. But there is clearly much
more to be said. To paraphrase Mao, let a thousand olive trees bear fruit!
Glenna Matthews
Stephen Torrey Whitman was the Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Genoa (Facoltà
di Lettere e Filosofia, Cattedra di Storia dell’America del Nord), during the semester February-May
2004. Professor Whitman is the author of the prize-winning book: The Price of Freedom. Free
People of Color in the Mid-Atlantic, 1750-1860 (1997). The Chair of Storia Americana (now Storia
dell’America del Nord) has supported the Senior Lectureship Program since the early 1970s, and
has received a long series of distinguished and internationally celebrated scholars of United States
History, who have enriched the projects, the PhD program, the seminars and Conferences both of
the discipline and of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies. They have offered during the past thirty
years a wide spectrum of subjects and areas of discussion, from social history to environmental
history, from black history to labor history, from woman’s history to Civil War history, from rural
history to Southern history, from oral history to the History of Civil Rights Movements. In
retrospect, the Fulbright Program at the University of Genoa has been a success and a great
opportunity for the students.
Valeria Gennaro Lerda
Donna Perry
Chair and Professor of English and American Literature, William Paterson University, Wayne, New
Jersey
Fulbright Lecturer, American Studies, Università di Roma Tre
In 1847 New Englander Margaret Fuller wrote from Rome: “The American in Europe, if a thinking
mind, can only become more American.” She added that the thinking American “is anxious to
gather and carry back with him [sic] every plant that will bear a new climate and new culture.”
As I pack to leave Rome after seven months, I find I can only partially agree with Fuller. I don’t
feel more American; rather, I feel more like a citizen of the world, for Iiving away from home has
made me realize, more than ever, how US-centered the political discourse and news reporting are in
the states. But I am carrying back some plants that I hope will take root when I go back. I have
learned much from the students and colleagues with whom I have worked here, from my travels
around Italy, and from Rome itself. The semester was a delight.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 16
The heart of the Fulbright experience, for me, was the teaching. I thoroughly enjoyed working with
intelligent, serious graduate students, whose questions and insights helped me rethink my own
assumptions. In both Roma Tre classes – Introduction to American Studies and Nineteenth Century
American Women in Literature and Life – my doctoral students and I struggled with the
contradications found in the United States, past and present
In the introductory course, readings like Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Howard Zinn’s A
People’s History of the United States, and Eric Schlossner’s Fast Food Nation encouraged students
to critically examine America’s history and culture, while first-person accounts by diverse writers
like Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Jose Antonio Villareal, Gloria Anzaldúa, Richard
Rodriguez, and Maxine Hong Kingston helped them appreciate the American experience – positive
and negative. A central question of the course – How have traditionally American myths, ideas,
beliefs, and ideals been formed and how have they been challenged/exposed/reinterpreted in our
times? – led us to study the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and
significant Supreme Court decisions.
For the second graduate course – on Nineteenth Century American Women’s Lives – we also read
primary and secondary texts: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Deborah
Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South and Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s essays in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America, for example. Again, we compared myth with reality, fiction with fact. And these
second-year students, like those in my other class, wrote persuasive papers and made intriguing
comparisons — between the United States and South America, in particular.
For me, their discussion of South American literature, history, and culture was a revelation. Because
many of them have interests in topics about which I know little (except for Borges, the writer one
student has chosen to work on), I learned a lot from my students – about flamenco, Brazilian
folksongs, Argentinian exiles, and influences between the two Americas. I also left the semester
with a reading list of books I plan to read – once they are translated into English.
I also enjoyed working with an undergraduate student at Roma Tre for whom I designed a directed
study in American History and Culture from 1860 to 1960. This experience was intense – not only
because it was one-on-one, but also because Angela’s questions were so direct. “I don’t think you
like President Bush,” she said one afternoon when we were discussing Vietnam. “Is that true?”
In the states we would call this a “teachable moment.” In fact, President Bush and the Iraq War had
not come up in the course of our discussions, but Angela had obviously made a connection –
probably with Vietnam. And I wanted to answer honestly.
So I explained why I opposed the invasion of Iraq — the inadequate (if not fraudulent) justification,
the precedent such unilateral actions set, the damage to relations with European allies, the casualties
to U.S., Italian and other forces, the civilian casualties, further destabilization of the Middle East,
etc. Angela was listening intently. She later told me that her father, who is in the Italian army, had
recently refused to go to Iraq – and receive higher pay — because he believed it was too dangerous.
She added that her cousins – who live in the states – don’t like Bush’s policies either.
Student questions like these from my graduate students were similarly challenging to answer: “Why
does the United States have the death penalty?” “Why aren’t there laws against guns?” “Why do
people in the states react so strongly to politicians’ personal lives (especially any kind of sex
scandal)?” “Why doesn’t the U.S. have health coverage for everyone?” “Why is a candidate’s belief
in God so important to voters?”

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 17
I could make some links with our readings – the wild west’s contribution to a culture of guns and
violence, a Puritan heritage – but the real answers are much more complex. I brought in articles
from The International Herald Tribune and publications like The Nation. We watched the first part
of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America that I had taped at home when it was on television. We talked
about the ways in which the United States is like and unlike Italy. I shared my own experiences. My
point in all of this was to get the students to see that the United States, like their country, is filled
with contradictions.
I also had the opportunity of meeting students and faculty from around Italy. Thanks to the
coordination and support of American Embassy staff in Naples, particularly Public Affairs Officer
Gloria Berbena and Program Assistant Viviana Padovano, and, in Sicily, Public Affairs Specialist
Rino Francaviglia, I did presentations in Naples, Salerno, Messina, and Catania on topics ranging
from “Louisa May Alcott and the Education of Women” to “How Feminist Criticism Has Changed
Our Reading of American Literature.”
Over memorable meals in local restaurants, I enjoyed meeting Professors Anna Maria Cataldi
Palombi and Adriana Corrado of Suor Orsola Benincasa University, then Professor Michele
Bottalico and several of his most congenial colleagues and friends from the University of Salerno.
In Messina Professors Mario Martino, Guiseppe Lombardo, and Giovanni Nicosia were very
thoughtful hosts, as was Professor Maria Vittoria D’Amico of the University of Catania.
I participated in some conferences. A paper on “Language and Power in Jamaica Kincaid“ for the
Transatlantic Studies Themes and Perspectives Conference in Padua even enabled me to reconnect
with a colleague I hadn’t seen since we were graduate students at Marquete University: Professor
Bill Boelhower at the University of Padua. Chairing a session at the American Embassy’s America:
A Work in Progress Conference at Venice International University gave me the opportunity to meet
both American colleagues, who came as speakers, and Italian guests like Dr. Alvise Farina of
Rotary International, who gave my husband Neill and me an insider’s tour of Venice one evening.
As a New Yorker, I very much enjoyed both writing and delivering a two-part paper on “City Life
and Sexual Politics in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” for a graduate student conference on
New York: Icona del Moderno at the Center for American Studies in Rome.
In all of these experiences I was stimulated – and sometimes challenged – by the responses I got
from student and faculty participants. Among the papers I am taking home are a few student letters
about Emily Dickinson that high school teacher Rosanna Sesto, who attended my presentation in
Catania with some members of her class, e-mailed to me. I was so pleased that my words had
prompted them to read – and enjoy – Dickinson’s poetry.
All of this was made possible by the constant support of Roma Tre Professor Cristina Giorcelli, my
mentor and new friend, who provided me with lunches, stimulating conversation, access to her
computer, tips on where to go in Sicily, and a flexible teaching schedule. Thanks, too, to Professor
Maria Anita Stefanelli of Roma Tre for her good counsel, and to Professor Anna Scacchi of the
University of Padua for reconnecting me with Bill, recommending a trip to Ischia and inviting me to
write an essay for a collection on the theme of mothers and daughters.
Finally, thanks to the Fulbright Commission, especially Laura Miele, and the American Embassy
Staff in Rome — John Dwyer, Jerome Oetgen, Anne Callaghan, and the incredible M. Paola Pierini
– for their help throughout my time in Italy.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 18
We ended our stay in Rome with 500.000 other cheering Simon and Garfunkle fans at the
Colosseum. And when they sang “Homeward Bound” I took it personally. But I know I will return.
Donna Perry
Visiting Scholars
James Longenbach, professor of English at the University of Rochester (New York), has been
living in Firenze since January. Having recently published a new book of poems, Fleet River, and a
new critical book, The Resistance to Poetry (both published by the University of Chicago Press), he
has been working on new poems and on several essays about the relationship of poetry
to music. One of these essays concerns the premiere of the Peri and Rinuccini’s Euridice, the first
surviving opera, which took place in the Palazzo Pitti in October, 1600. Longenbach has been
working on the score in the library of the Villa I Tatti. He returned to the U.S. at the end of July.
Among recent guests at Fondazione Bogliasco, Genova, were Susan Gubar, Mary-Jo Salter, J.D.
McClatchy, and Anthony Hecht. Mary Jo Salter, who teaches at Mount Holyoke, gave a talk on
Dickinson to students at Universty of Genova in April. Her last book is Open Shutters: Poems.
Conference Participation
Paola Boi, Università di Cagliari
The African Atlantic: The Making of Black Diasporas
Winchester, 13-15 April 2003
The Fifth Biennial Conference of CAAR gathered more than 100 scholars from all over the world
to discuss notions of African Atlantic and Black Diaspora, focusing not only on the old triangle of
Africa, Americas and Europe, but also extending the range to Alaska, Terra del Fuego, the Pacific
and Cyberland.
The three plenary sessions and the 24 crowded workshops testified the recognition of an extensive
interchange across the Atlantic and beyond. The personal and psychological significance of this
wide interchange underlies the necessity that the interconnection between African American
Studies, Caribbean Studies, Women Studies etc. be internationally recognized and practiced. The
success of the conference confirmed the fact that African American research and its ever growing
relevance can set the paramaters, the theoretical and empirical understanding of many other issues.
One session was dedicated to the presentation of the new volumes of Forecaast, the CAAR series
published by Lit Verlag.
Paola Boi and Sabine Broeck (Univ. of Bremen) presented their book Crossroutes, the Meanings of
“Race” for the 21 st Century, which gathers the proceedings of the fourth CAAR Conference, held
in Cagliari, in 2001.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 19
Giorgio Mariani, Università di Roma
Emerson 2003: An International Celebration of the Emerson Bicentennial
Università di Roma La Sapienza, 16-18 October 2003
This conference was organized by the Emerson Research Group (Sonia Di Loreto [Rutgers
University]; Carlo Martinez [University of Chieti-Pescara]; Anna Scannavini [University of
L’Aquila]; Igina Tattoni [University of Roma 1]; coordinator: Giorgio Mariani [University of Roma
1]), in collaboration with the U.S. Embassy, the Centro Studi Americani, and the English Dept. of
Roma 1. Somewhat ironically, it turned out to be the only international conference celebrating the
Emerson bicentennial held outside the US. The irony lies in the fact that, while Italians showed
considerable interest in Emerson in the early part of the Twentieth century, in Italian American
Studies of the post World War II-period Emerson ended up being the Cinderella figure of the
American Renaissance. The goal of the conference was to understand why this happened as well as
to stimulate a renewed interest in this often misunderstood figure by presenting some of the most
interesting directions taken by Emerson criticism over the last decades.
Senior Emerson scholars such as Richard Poirier, Joel Myerson, Ronald Bosco, Shoji Goto, and
Vito Amoruso took part in the conference, along with younger colleagues from both sides of the
Atlantic (Anita Patterson, John Bryant, Richard Grusin, Caterina Ricciardi, Annalisa Goldoni, and
many others). The event opened with Poirier’s lecture “Why is Emerson so Easily Misunderstood,”
and included three other general lectures by Joel Myerson (“‘Not Instruction, but Provocation’:
Emerson as Teacher”), Anita Patterson (“Emerson and the Enigma of Friendship”), Vito Amoruso.
(“Il lavoro delle madrepore: Emerson e la modernità americana”). Eight afternoon workshops
covered a variety of subjects, including the issue of Emerson’s reputation and influence both at
home and abroad; Emerson’s visit to Italy and his interest in Italian literature and life; Emerson’s
views on ethics, science, politics, and literature; the pedagogical implications of Emerson’s
philosophy; the question of how to place Emerson’s texts in a larger international context.
In the spirit of Emerson’s own words in “Circles” – “People wish to be settled; only as far as they
are unsettled is there any hope for them” – the overall aim of the conference was not to stage a
formal “celebration” of Emerson as one of the key figures within a larger American literary
mythology, but rather to productively challenge and unsettle the ideas of all participants. Judging
from the lively debates that followed both lectures and papers, as well as from the degree of student
participation, the conference managed to offer a significant opportunity to rethink Emerson and
Emersonian questions in new ways.
The Proceedings of the Conference will be published sometime in the Fall. Those interested in
purchasing a copy may contact either Giorgio Mariani (giorgio.mariani[at]uniroma1.it) or Igina
Tattoni (igina.tattoni[at]uniroma1.it)
Roberto Birindelli, Università di Siena
Paul Auster in Parma
Paul Auster, the celebrated author of The New York Trilogy and acknowledged master of the
“philosophical thriller,” was in Italy during the second half of November 2003 and spent a few days
in Parma on the invitation of Fondazione Culturale Edison, a local group active in the promotion of
arts movies. He was accompanied by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. The organizers had prepared
for Auster a closely-knit program focused on his short but intense cinematographic experience. It
included a press conference in the scenic Auditorium of Palazzo Sanvitale on Friday 21-11, during
which Auster was assisted by Clara Bartocci. On the following evening at the Teatro al Parco a
large audience attended a projection of Lulu on the Bridge (1998) — the film that Auster had

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 20
authored and directed prior to his participation as a juror to Cannes Film Festival. The program was
concluded on Monday 24 by a retrospective that included screening of Smoke (1995) and Blue in
the Face (1995), the two previous productions in which Auster had a role as scriptwriter and
assistant director.
For moviegoers, who had already enjoyed watching the multifarious activity centering on Auggie’s
tobacco shop and involving characters representative of Brooklyn street life, equally entangled in
the paradoxical situations and chance happenings that Auster has used to the full in his novels, it
was an opportunity to see a film poorly circulated by the Italian distribution system. They also had a
unique chance to discuss with the author points of interest during a question-and-answer period that
took place before the projection of the film, and was co-ordinated by Roberto Birindelli. The actual
screening was preceded by a reading from the Book of Illusions, for which Marco Baliani provided
the Italian voice, availing himself of the translation published by Einaudi. The Turin publishers
have also secured rights for Auster’s next book, Oracle Night, forthcoming in 2004 with the
translation of Massimo Bocchiola.
Renzo Crivelli, Università di Trieste
The city as text: writing the city, cities of writing
Università di Trieste, 3 December 2003
A one-day interdisciplinary conference on the topic “he city as text: writing the city, cities of
writing” was organised by the Department of Anglo-Germanic literatures and cultures of the
University of Trieste on 3 December, 2003. The conference brought together scholars from English
and American as well as German and Germanic Philology Studies and was opened by Claudio
Magris (University of Trieste), and chaired by Renzo S.Crivelli, Carla Comellini and Maria
Carolina Foi of the University of Trieste. Vita Fortunati (University of Bologna), as guest speaker
provided an exhaustive and multidisciplinary account of “The utopian cities between imagination
and history” that considered the urbanistic contituent of the literary imaginary of the city. 18th
century English literature was examined by Flavio Gregori (University of Venice) and Luca Rossi
(University of Bologna). Gregori focused on early 18th century satiric poetry by the Scriblerus Club
writers and its attempts at opposing the proliferating and excessive “anomic space of modernity”
epitomised by London, while Rossi in his “The Devil’s house” tackled the dialectics of places and
settings in some early 18th century fictions which combine Puritan and libertine influences alike.
As to the 19th century, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations was discussed in two presentations,
respectively by Giovanni Luciani (University of Roma La Sapienza), who identified in
“Wemmick’s castle” an alternative space between country and city where privacy and individuality
could be preserved in the face of the annihilation threatened by the metropolis, and by Alessandra
Squeo (University of Bari), who probed deep into the “Illusions and deceits in Victorian London,”
and the consequent difficulty and frustration in the protagonist’s attempt to interpret the
labyrinthine Victorian London. A perspective on modern and contemporary literary treatments of
the city in British literature were also afforded by Roberta Gefter (University of Trieste) who
examined Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin by analysing the relation between city and
text in the terms of the autobiographical strain and the identification between the autobiographical
namesake narrator and the city, metaphorised as body, by Marianna Zavagno (University of
Birmingham) who illustrated the Liverpool poets of the sixties, their imagery and their often
femininised representations of the city, while Bruna C.Mancini (University of L’Aquila) considered
a “London to browse through” in two novels by Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcok where some
intense and “artistic” visions of the British capital literally re-write the urban historical and cultural
texture. A comparative approach to the “mysteries” of the city in early 19th century European
fiction was provided by Eva Meineke (University of IULM Milano) while William Boelhower

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 21
(University of Padova) explored the role of Venice in Modernist theory of writing in its dual
valence of home and ship, pertaining to dwelling and nomadism, as simultaneously an existential
topos and a fictional trope. Finally, Carla Del Zotto (University of Roma La Sapienza), Michael
Dallapiazza (University of Urbino) and Lucia Sinisi (University Bari) gave illuminating insights
into the medieval representations of the city as phantasmagoria or hell. All the papers presented at
the conference are to be published in the forthcoming number (X - 2003) of Prospero, Rivista di
Culture Anglo-Germaniche, Università di Trieste, which is due at the end of February 2004. For
further information contact Roberta Gefter at gefter[at]units.it.
John Paul Russo, University of Miami
Real Cities: Urban Spaces and Representations of Canada and the United States
Università di Torino, 16 March 2004
A Conference entitled “Real Cities: Urban Spaces and Representations of Canada and the United
States” was held at the University of Torino under the direction of Carmen Concilio and Andrea
Carosso, both of the Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, on 16 March 2004. Giving focus to
the topic of the real and the imaginary in urban space, all papers considered either Toronto or Las
Vegas, cities which have a rich and complex history of literary and visual representation, not only in
national but in a global perspective.
In the morning session, following introductory remarks by Carosso on the concept of the “frontier”
with respect to Las Vegas, four speakers analyzed the city from various perspectives: Joy Ramirez
(Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) on “The Desert of the Real—Las Vegas and the Post-modern City”;
John Paul Russo (Univ. of Miami, Florida) on “The Italian in Las Vegas: from Piovene and Calvino
to Colombo and Franci”; Robert Casillo (Univ. of Miami, Florida) on “Sanctity and Sacrilege in
Martin Scorsese’s Las Vegas”; and Federico Luisetti (Univ. of Torino) on “Emptiness and Meaning
in Las Vegas.”
The afternoon session was chaired by Concilio whose introductory remarks concerned the nature of
Toronto as “a city without borders, a center far from the centre.” There were three papers on the
Canadian city: by Franca Bernabei (Univ. of Venice) on “Post-colonial Spaces of Representation:
the Canadian Global City”; Simona Bertacco (Univ. of Milano) on “Toronto the Blue; the Halfimagined
City of Post-modernism”; Barbara del Mercato (Univ. of Venice) on “Poetry between
Community and Institution: the Case of Toronto.” Each session was strengthened by numerous
interventi. The conference was sponsored by the Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio and the
Facoltà’ di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Univ. of Torino, and by the Consulate General of the
USA, Milan.
Sabrina Vellucci, Università di Roma Tre
Miti Americani Oggi
Università di Roma Tre, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, 18-19 March 2004
“American Myths Today” was the title of a conference promoted by the Department of American
Studies at Università di Roma Tre. The event was the outcome of a research project conducted by
the Department of American Studies under the supervision of Caterina Ricciardi, and involving
scholars from different departments and universities. A volume collecting the conference papers is
now forthcoming with Diabasis (Reggio Emilia). The research was conceived as a pan-American
approach to the study of “myth” in its contemporary manifestations. It aimed at identifying the
processes of revision, deconstruction and regeneration to which myths are subjected in the age of

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 22
globalization, information technology and multiculturalism. Such “forms of the collective
unconscious” were investigated through both “canonical” and popular literary texts, the visual arts,
and the artefacts of mass culture. The conference, organized in three panels discussing “Patterns,”
“Heroes/Icons,” and “Places,” presented papers on Anglo and Latin American cultures that brought
together different perspectives on the Continent in a fertile and dynamic dialogue. Contributions
explored the ambivalent discourses of American myths, their migrations and cross-fertilizations in
different contexts, and the perpetual process of semantic regeneration that grants myth the power to
assume the irrefutable value of “nature.” Introduced by Caterina Ricciardi, and chaired by
Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli in the opening session, the conference hosted papers by Ettore Finazzi
Agrò (Roma “La Sapienza”), Amanda Salvioni (Cassino), Ilaria Magnani (Roma Tre), Felice De
Cusatis (Roma Tre), Stefano Tedeschi (Roma Tre), Flavio Fiorani (Venezia), Roberto Serrai
(Firenze), Caterina Pincherle (Roma Tre), Daniela Rossini (Roma Tre), Nicola Bottiglieri
(Cassino), Fabio Saglimbeni (Roma Tre), Sabrina Vellucci (Roma Tre), Anna Scacchi (Padova),
Cristina Giorcelli (Roma), Maria Anita Stefanelli (Roma Tre), Giovanni Blengino (Roma Tre),
Luisa Pranzetti (Roma “La Sapienza), Alessandro Clericuzio (Roma Tre), Valerio Massimo De
Angelis (Macerata), Laura Visconti (Roma Tre). Ettore Finazzi Agrò and Giovanni Blengino
chaired the second and third session. Discussants were Richard Ambrosini (Roma Tre), Fedora
Giordano (Torino), and Flavio Fiorani (Venezia).
Mario Maffi, Università degli Studi di Milano
America in the Course of Human Events: Presentations and Interpretations
University of Prague, 2-5 April 2004
Beautifully framed by “magic Prague” and finely organized by the Department of English of the
local Charles University under the direction of professor Martin Procházka, by the Czech and
Slovak Association for American Studies, and by EAAS Officers professors Josef Jarab, Ole O.
Moen and Hans Bak, the 2004 EAAS Conference (“America in the Course of Human Events:
Presentations and Interpretations”) was held between 2 and 5 April2004, and celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of the Association (to which a panel discussion was also devoted on Sunday, 4 April).
Twenty-six workshops, on topics ranging from “Ethnicity, Race and Memory: The Politics of
Representation” to “The Political Role of the U.S. Supreme Court,” from “History and Pre-History:
Literary Works Between the Two World Wars” to “Work and Welfare across the Atlantic:
Influences and Comparisons,” from “European Reception of American Transcendentalism:
Problems of Interpretation” to “Trauma, Memory, History”; eight parallel lectures; three plenary
lectures; three shoptalks (the American Studies, the Historians’, the Literature ones); one meeting of
the editors of national Journals of American Studies; the awarding of the Biennial American Studies
Network Book Prize (to professor Gert Buehlens); the CAAR Executive Committee Meeting and
the European Cluster for American Studies Network Meeting; the EAAS General Assembly (during
which the new board was elected, presided over by professor Marc Chenétier); and, last but not
least, a lively Poetry Reading, this intense schedule (which acutely competed with the city’s intense
allure) spoke for itself, and was successfully followed by scholars and students from all over the
world. The Prague Conference closed with a “See you again in Cyprus!,” venue of the next
meeting in 2006.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 23
Lina Unali, Università di Roma II
2004 EAAS: Workshop 18
Historical, Social and Literary Asian American Perspectives at the Turn of the Century
This workshop was organized by Lina Unali with the intention of carrying out a critical discourse
on both Asian American literature and the relationship between East and West, whose bases were
laid in 1996, during the EAAS Conference in Warsaw. Workshop 18 proved to be particularly
interesting because of the variety of topics discussed by the speakers and the differences in their
critical approach.
Mariko Iijima and Jinzhao Li offered an Asian perspective on the subject they chose for their
papers: the diversification of Japanese communities in Hawaii after the annexation to the United
States (in the case of Dr. Iijima) and ethnic tourism, gender analysis, and U.S. colonial and imperial
history (in the case of Dr. Li). The two speeches were characterized by the importance attached to a
sociological analysis and statistics.
The other speakers offered a European perspective on Asian American studies. Dr. Simal Gonzalez
traced a history of Asian American criticism, which constituted an ideal framework for the other
papers. Dr. Gardner and Dr. Carter explored the connection between the Asian American cultural
and literary discourse and music: Dr. Gardner focused on Rushdiâ?Ts The Ground beneath Her
Feet, a pop version of Orpheus and Eurydice where rock music is celebrated as a global
phenomenon, while Dr. Carter explored the Japanese-American relationship in the album Tokyo
Rose. Dr. Marino focused her attention on another field within Asian American studies which has
not received much attention to date: Asian American childrenâ?Ts literature. In her speech, she
pointed out three phases of the Asian American literary production for children, from 1938 to the
present.
Maria Cristina Iuli, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli
2004 EAAS: Workshop 20
Trauma, Memory, History
The workshop addressed the relation between traumatic events in the history of the United States
and their inscriptions in literary and historical narratives, focussing on the trope of trauma and its
relation to both representation and witnessing. Papers addressed, among others: Nora Okja Keller’s
novel Comfort Woman and its problematic re-inscription of the sexual servitude of Korean women
under the Japanese military occupation within a set of contemporary North American cultural
scripts which tend to recontain the significance of the historical trauma (Deborah Madsen); Toni
Morrison’s Beloved as a breakthrough moment for postcolonial and post middle-passage cultural
recuperation (Sabine Broeck); the historico-critical engagement of historians and African American
writers with the “white folk culture of lyinching” memorialized by lynching postcards that
circulated among white communities in the wake of such crimes (Andrew Warnes); the conditions
of production and censorship of John Huston’s film The Battle of San Pietro, shot in Italy during
WWII, and its later recuperation within a cathartic process of reconciliation with the past by those
who survived that battle (Daria Frezza). The implications of appropriating a camp survivor identity
and the public exhibition of the forgery for the project of remembering the events of the Nazi
concentration camps, in Cato Jaramillo’s 1995 “fake” memoir Too Stubborn to Die (Bruno Arich-
Gertz); Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Holocaust and its positioning within the debate about the
viability of aesthetic discourse in relation to the experience of the Shoah (Agatha Preis-Smith); The
patterns and strategies enlisted by 9-11 literature to remember, “frame the void”, and integrate

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 24
memory and remembrance in the forging of what has been called post-calamity imaginative
restoration (Aili McCannon).
Michele Bottalico, Università di Salerno
Lunga vita al romanzo. La metafora spaziale nella narrativa dell’Occidente
Università di Bari, 10-12 April 2003
An interdisciplinary Convention on “Space Metaphors in Western Fiction” was
held in Bari, 10-12 April 2003. Speakers included, among others, Piero Boitani,
Maria Teresa Chialant, Francesco Fiorentino, Romano Luperini, Fabrizia Ramondino, Amerigo
Restucci, and AISNA members Michele Bottalico, Remo Ceserani,
Agostino Lombardo. The relationship between plot and space in fiction - from the Hellenistic forms
of narration to contemporary novel - was the core of the debate. Speakers focused on such topics as
the boundless space of myth, the narrow places of everyday life, the space of fear, memory, desire,
conscience, subconsciousness, language, corporeity, both from a diachronic and synchronic
perspective. They highlighted the transformation, in time, of “space”: it was a
frame or a background, then it became the central theme of many fictional texts.
Massimo Bacigalupo, Università di Genova
Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut
University of Connecticut, Storrs, 8-10 April 2004
This was a sumptuous get together, in true Stevens style, to celebrate the half-century of the
publication of Collected Poems. It opened with a panel of poets (J.D. McClatchy, Milton Bates,
Susan Howe, James Longenbach) and included another panel discussion on “The next fifty years”
in which reassessments were ripe and projects were broached.
John Serio , one of the speakers at the latter panel and editor of The Wallace
Stevens Journal, has since written as follows:
“I have set up an e-mail list of people interested in Wallace Stevens so that I can efficiently send
periodic announcements. If you would like to be removed from this list, or if you are receiving
duplicates, please let me know.
The Wallace Stevens Society has been invited to sponsor a panel at the Twentieth-Century
Literature Conference to be held at the University of Louisville (KY) on February 24-26, 2005. If
anyone is interested in organizing a panel on Stevens to represent the Wallace Stevens Society,
please let me know and I will provide you with further details. Periodically check our Web site at
www.wallacestevens.com for changes. For example, in addition to redesigning the Web site soon,
we hope to put up a free on-line concordance to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In addition, we hope
to put on-line all the issues of the journal in PDF format so that scholars can readily read, print,
search, and/or copy and paste material from any issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal.”
The Conference included a trip to Hartford and a visit to Stevens’ office at the Hartford, with a final
brilliant lecture at the Hartford Atheneum by Eugene Gaddis on the Stevens Family and the
Atheneum, which promoted exhibitions of contemporary art (especially Surrealism) in Stevens’s
decisive pre-war years. Apparently he would sneak in during the lunch hour for a private view of
the exhibits, and in the Atheneum (which offered art classes) Holly Stevens (the poet’s daughter)
found a home away from home (which she needed!).

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 25
The Hartford tour was organized by the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, which is
planning to set up 13 markers with the stanzas ot “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” between
Wallace’s home and his office, to mark his daily walk to work.
L’impulso autobiografico nell’Ottocento e Novecento in Gran Bretagna e nei Paesi di lingua
inglese.
Università di Salerno, 13-14 May 2004
This conference, sponsored by AIA and AISNA, was an occasion for the presidents of the two
associations to meet and arrange further contacts on matters of common interest. Carlo Pagetti,
current AIA president, gave a talk on autobiography in Charles Darwin and other scientists. Judy
Simons (De Montfort University, GB), spoke of Louisa May Alcott’s “masks” (referring to her
story “Behind the Mask”). Dominique Marçais discussed Polish writer Eva Hoffman, and Carla
Locatelli of Trento feminist theory. Vita Fortunati of Bologna spoke of Lytton Strachey. Several
graduate students gave fascinating presentations, among them Clara Antonucci on “Italian
American Creativity.” Maria Teresa Chialant and Michele Bottalico did a terrific job as organizers
and made us all love Salerno and Fisciano.
Re-Reading T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Università di Milano, 19-20 May 2004
This interdisciplinary conference was organized by Giovanni Cianci of Università di Milano in Via
Festa del Perdono. There was also an interesting exhibition documenting the London artistic context
of Eliot’s poetry and prose of 1914-1920, and the work of the U.S. designer Edward McKnight
Kauffer (1890-1954), a collaborator of Eliot. The key lecture was given by Jewel Spears Brooker
(Eckerd College, Florida), who explained how Eliot reconciles “impersonality” and his admiration
for personal expression in writers like Yeats and Pound. Other speakers were Claudia Corti, Gianni
Cianci, Michael Hollington, Jason Harding, Caroline Parey, Bernard Brugière, Emanuele Ferrari,
and Andrea Carosso.
Elisabetta Marino, Università di Roma 2
2004 MESEA Conference: The Development of Asian British Literature, 1984-2004
Thessaloniki, May 20-23
The fourth MESEA Conference (Multi-ethnic studies in Europe and Americas), entitled “Ethnic

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 26
Communities in Democratic Societies,” was organized in Thessaloniki, a city which proved to be
particularly pleasant, in its combination of modernity and ancient history. The venue of the
Conference was the old building of Aristotle University, where both plenary sessions and
workshops took place. Among the subjects of the Conference were transnationality, migrations,
diasporic literature and Afro-Asian cross-cultural encounters. Some of the workshops have also
dealt with the theme of the Iraqi war, thus demonstrating the strong social engagement on the part
of the scholars who took part in the event. “The Development of Asian British Literature, 1984 –
2004“ was the title of the workshop co-chaired by Lina Unali and Elisabetta Marino. The papers
read during this workshop identified two different tendencies within the new field of Asian British
Studies, whose critical and theoretical bases have been defined for the first time. In her contribution
Lina Unali aimed at presenting mainstream Asian British Literature as separate from the literature
produced by the Chinese British communities. She considered in particular writers such as Timothy
Mo, Jung Chang, Yeh Mah, Xinran and Guo Sheng. Various differences between Chinese
American literature and Chinese British literature have also been pointed out. Elisabetta Marino
concentrated her essay on the production of the Asian British communities, by focusing on the
literary outcome of the Bangladeshi community in Sheffield, consisting of four bilingual
anthologies (Bangla/English) published in the time-span between 1990 and 2003. Riccardo Rosati
read a paper on The Remains of the Day, by maistream Japanese British writer K. Ishiguro. Aiping
Zhang’s paper on Timothy Mo was also read and discussed.
Mena Mitrano, Università di Roma I
Poetry and Sexuality
University of Sterling, 30 June-4 July 2004
Al convegno hanno partecipato autorevoli studiosi quali James Kincaid (University of Southern
California) che ha parlato di “The criminal muse: nostalgia, sex, and children,” Joseph Bristow
(University of California, Los Angeles), con un paper “The Sex of Michael Field” dedicato
all’identità letteraria delle due autrici vittoriane Katharine Bradley e Edith Cooper, e Germaine
Greer che in una provocatoria lecture, “The Sex of Poetry,” ha sostenuto che il sesso della poesia è
ancora maschile. Numerosi i poeti. Tra le voci prestigiose, quella di Sharon Olds, Liz Lockhead,
Jackie Kay, e della performance artist Patience Agbabi. Tra i nuovi poeti dagli Stati Uniti segnalo
Michelle Balzè, che modella la sua poesia sul disincanto e sull’attenzione dei versi di Frank
O’Hara, e Thomas James Stevens, membro della Akwesame Mohawk Nation nello Stato di New
York, la cui lirica eloquente e originale usa la lingua per recuperare la memoria e la storia. Ecco
una delle sue riscritture dalla lingua Mohawk inclusa in Combing the Snakes from His Hair (East
Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 2002):
Canoe Song
Teiohonwa:ka ne’ni akhonwe:ia. Kon’tatieshon iohnekotatie. Wakkawehatie, wakkawehatie.
The canoe is very fast. It is mine. All day I hit the water. I paddle along. I paddle along.
I am the hull—rapid against your stream./
Birch beneath the ribs./
circumnavigating your body.//
Endless propeller of my arm/
as it circles to find the flow.//
I move this way against you./
I move this way./

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 27
Dall’Italia sono intervenute Judith Munat (Università di Pisa) con “The Caged Bird: the expression
of sexuality in twentieth-century women’s poetry,” Brenda Porster (Università di Firenze) la quale
oltre a relazionare su “Reversed perspectives on women’s bodies: the dancer in W. B. Yeats and in
Alicia Ostriker” ha anche letto le sue poesie, e Mena Mitrano con un paper intitolato “On no longer
eating together: eros and poetry in the art of Jasper Johns.” Il convegno è stato organizzato da
Glennis Byron, Angela Smith, ed Andrew Sneddon. Per informazioni poetryconference[at]stir.ac.uk
Elèna Mortara, Università di Roma Tre
American Experiences in a Conference on Jewish Emancipation promoted by the new Roman
Center of Studies on Judaism of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”
The newly established Roman Center of Studies on Judaism (“Centro Romano di Studi
sull’Ebraismo,” or CeRSE) of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” a Center promoting research
and teaching on Judaism, co-sponsored by the Jewish Community of Rome, was inaugurated on
May 19, 2004 with a conference on the root of antisemitism by Israeli writer Abraham B.
Yehoshua. The Center organized its first international conference on “Jews and Emancipation in
the Formation of European Conscience” (Ebrei ed emancipazione nella formazione della coscienza
europea) at the University of Tor Vergata, on June 16-17, 2004, on the occasion of the main Roman
Synagogue Centennial. Two moments of the conference were devoted to issues and experiences
related to American culture: the paper read by Elèna Mortara, “Metaphors of Emancipation: Jews
and African Americans in the Literature of the United States and Europe,” and the final moment of
the conference, in which an artistically designed and hand-written certificate was given by the
President of the Jewish Community of Rome and its Chief Rabbi to David Kertzer (professor at
Brown University), in memory and honor of his father, Rabbi Morris Kertzer, chaplain in the
American Army during World War II, who entered Rome on Sunday June 4, 1944, while the city
was being liberated from the nazi-fascist yoke, and on Friday evening June 9, 1944 celebrated the
first Sabbath service in the Rome Synagogue, crowded with thousands of people. After the informal
ceremony of commemoration, a few witnesses who were in the audience spoke about the event,
conveying the emotion of that historical moment of liberation.
For information, contact Elèna Mortara (who is on the scientific board of the Center),
mortara[at]lettere.uniroma2.it , or write to: Centro Romano di Studi sull’Ebraismo (CeRSE), Via
Columbia 1, 00133 Roma, ebraismo[at]storia.uniroma2.it

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 28
Notebook
2006 OAH David Thelen Award. The Organization of American Historians sponsors a biennial
prize (formerly the Foreign Language Article Prize) for the best article on American history
published in a foreign language. The winning article will be translated into English and published
in the Journal of American History. Entries must have been published in the preceding two
calendar years. To be eligible, an article should be concerned with the past (recent or distant) or
with issues of continuity and change. It should also be concerned with events or processes that
began, developed, or ended in what is now the United States. It should make a significant and
original contribution to the understanding of U.S. history. We welcome comparative and
international studies that fall within these guidelines. The Organization of American Historians
invites authors of eligible articles to nominate their work. We urge scholars who know of eligible
publications written by others to inform those authors of the prize. Under unusual circumstances
unpublished manuscripts will be considered. We ask authors to consult with the committee chair
before submitting unpublished material. Since the purpose of the prize is to expose Americanists to
scholarship originally published in a language other than Englis h-to overcome the language barrier
that keeps scholars apart-this prize is not open to articles whose manuscripts were originally
submitted for publication in English or by people for whom English is their first language. Please
write a one- to two-page essay (in English) explaining why the article is a significant and original
contribution to our understanding of American history. The essay and five copies of the article,
clearly labeled “2006 David Thelen Award Entry,” must be mailed to the following address and
received by 1 May 2005: Joanne Meyerowitz, Chair, David Thelen Award Committee, Journal of
American History, 1215 East Atwater Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47401. The application should
also include the following information: name, mailing address, institutional affiliation, fax
number, e-mail address (if available), and language of submitted article. Copies of the article and
application will be reviewed by contributing editors of the Journal of American History who are
proficient in the language of the submission, as well as by referees (proficient in the language of
the submitted article) who are experts on its subject matter. The final prize decision will be made
by the David Thelen Award Committee by 1 February 2006. The winner will be notified by the
OAH and furnished with details of the annual meeting and the awards presentation. In addition, the
winning article will be printed in the Journal of American History and its author awarded a
certificate and a $500 subvention for refining the article’s English translation.
Bogliasco Foundation. Scholars and creative artists with substantial projects can apply for
residencies in Bogliasco (Genova) for autumn 2005. Deadline: 15 January 2005. Write to:
Fondazione Bogliasco, Via Aurelia 4, 16031 Bogliasco GE, tel. 010 3470049.
AISNA Member Giovanna Franci writes that as of 31 March 2004 she has officially become full
professor of “Letterature anglo-americane” at Università di Bologna.
Bianca Tarozzi and William Boelhower were winners of the “idoneità a professore ordinario” that
was offered at the University of Verona.
Igina Tattoni and M. Giulia Fabi were winners of the “idoneità a professore associato” that was
offered at Università di Lecce.
Make It New: The Rise of Modernism is the catalogue to an exhibition recently presented at the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The catalogue contains
remarks on modernism by Russell Banks, Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick and others, and has
100 illustrations, including a sketch by Wyndham Lewis for a portrait of T.S. Eliot. Make It New is
available from the HRHRC at $22.95.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 29
Dizionario dei personaggi letterari (3 vols., Torino: UTET, 2003, pp. 2166) – a major reference
work with entries on characters in world literature – has a very generous coverage of American
literature. The section was coordinated by Mario Materassi. It includes contributions by Gianfranca
Balestra, Clara Bartocci, Marilla Battilana, Francesca Bisutti, Michele Bottalico, Alide
Cagidemetrio, Alessandra Contenti, Maria Vittoria D’Amico, Giordano De Biasio, Anna De
Biasio, Cristina Giorcelli, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Mario Materassi, Elèna Mortara di Veroli,
Giuseppe Nori, Sergio Perosa, Annamaria Pinazzi, Biancamaria Pisapia, Gaetano Prampolini,
Caterina Ricciardi, Ugo Rubeo, Anna Secco, Roberto Serrai, Stefano Tani, Igina Tattoni, Michela
Vanon Alliata, Itala Vivan.
American Studies Discussion List. AISNA Members interested in becoming part of the “Studi
americani” discussion list initiated in 2002 should address inquiries to: studiamericaniowner[at]yahoogroups.com.
Nuova Corrente, the Genoa journal, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a special issue (#131,
2003) in which various contributors remembered the journal’s early history. The late Alfredo
Rizzardi contributed an article about his editing the crucial “Pound Symposium” (#5-6, 1956). For
this 1956 issue Elizabeth Bishop wrote her major poem “Visits to St. Elizabeths.” The poem is
reprinted in its early form with Rizzardi’s translation, and discussed in an article by Francesco
Rognoni. There are also poems by Zanzotto, Luzi, Giudici, Greppi, De Signoribus and others, and
a section on “La vita quotidiana” edited by Luisa Villa. Nuova Corrente is unique in uniting
theoretical and creative work of high quality. It is published by Tilgher-Genova.
Daniela Ciani and Gregory Dowling received the “idoneità a professore associato” in the
concorso in American Literature in Venice, September 2004.
Giuseppe Ierolli, an independent scholar who works in a bank, is in the process of putting all of
Emily Dickinson’s poems on line, with a working translation and occasional observations on
cruxes. In September 2004 he had arrived at Johnson # 1322.
See http://www.emilydickinson.it
ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) is the most
important international bibliography solely devoted to English-language studies (literary and
lingustic). AISNA Members who wish their articles and volumes of 2004 to be listed should
send copies to professor Carlo Bajetta (Università Cattolica, L.go Gemelli 1 20123
Milano).They should also provide the information requested on the ABELL form available
at www.geocities.com/abell_ita. For further information write Massimo Bacigalupo,
37237[at]unige.it.
Associations and Scholarly Societies
The Wallace Stevens Society
I am pleased (very pleased!) to announce that our Web site (http://www.wallacestevens.com) now
provides a free Online Concordance to the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Please visit our Web site
soon and try it out. With it, one can search for any word or phrase, use wild cards (place an asterisk
after a word or a part of a word; for example, “serio*” will return “serious”), match exact phrases or

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 30
case, and derive a statistical ranking of the usage of a word. Our updated Web site also features
special offers such as a reduced price on our popular Wallace Stevens Coffee Mug (now only
$6.95) and the hardback edition of Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays (now only $4.95).
These are great gift ideas! All proceeds benefit the Wallace Stevens Society and assist us in our
efforts to promote the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Please help by joining the Wallace Stevens
Society and receiving the journal and/or by purchasing one or more of our Stevens-related items.
John N. Serio
American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS)
The American Theatre and Drama Society is an incorporated organization dedicated to the study of
United States theatre and drama—its varied
hisstories, traditions, literatures, and performances within its cultural contexts. ATDS also
encourages the evolving debate exploring national identities and experiences through research,
pedagogy, and practice. ATDS
recognizes that notions of America and the U.S. encompass migrations of peoples and cultures that
overlap and influence one another. To this end, ATDS welcomes scholars, teachers, and
practitioners world-wide.
Membership Benefits
Subscription to The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. On-line ATDS ListServ registration,
allowing free interchange with
members of the society, including conference announcements, paper calls, research queries,
publishing announcements, professional contacts within the field. Membership Directory, listing
contact information and specific research interests of all our members. Semi-annual ATDS
Newsletter. As a Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, ATDS sponsors
members-preferred panels and holds its Annual Board and Membership meetings at the ATHE
Conference. ATDS sponsors guaranteed panels at the Modern Languages Association
(MLA) and American Literature Association (ALA) conferences. Sponsorship of an adjudicated
Graduate Debut Panel at the ATHE
Conference; participants receive $100 awards.
Eligibility to nominate a colleague for the annual Betty Jean Jones Award, honoring an outstanding
teacher of American theatre and drama.
Membership Application
NAME_______________________________ INSTITUTION______________________
ADDRESS____________________________ WORK PHONE_____________________
_______________________________ HOME PHONE_____________________
FAX:______________________ EMAIL________________________
RESEARCH INTERESTS (to be published in our directory):
Check ONE: _____New Member _____Renewal
Check ONE: _____Student ($15) _____General ($25)
_____Adjunct; Parttime;Temp.Unemployed (Circle ONE) ($15)
Check ONE: _____Check Enclosed (Pay to ATDS) _____ Pay with Credit Card (information below)
PLEASE NOTE: There is a $.50 Service Charge for Credit Card Transactions.
_______
Mail To: Professor Bill Demastes
Department of English
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 31
Journals
EJAC - European Journal of American Culture
You will remember that in 2003 members of the Association received copies of the European
Journal of American Culture Volume 22 as a sample volume. Following on from this arrangement,
Intellect as the journal publisher is
now willing to offer all members the opportunity to subscribe to the journal in 2004 for just 20
Euros if you pay by a Euro cheque, or the equivalent of £10 Sterling if you pay by Credit card or a
cheque made out in Pounds Sterling currency. If you wish to subscribe, you can contact the
publisher directly. You can
consult their web site at www.intellectbooks.com, or send an email to
orders[at]intelle ctbooks.com, or write to them at PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK. Be sure to
state clearly that you are subscribing as a member of the Italian Association for North American
Studies. In return for Intellect’s support for the Association, it is worth
mentioning that you may wish to ask your library to subscribe to the Journal. This is a very good
opportunity for you to let your library know that with Volume 23 they will have free electronic
access via a trusted third party server to the full text of the journal if they subscribe. This is a major
incentive for libraries to subscribe and we can make sure that institutions here in Italy are aware of
this development. Please try to find the time to act as an “ambassador” for the journal and visit your
library. And don’t forget to submit articles for publication to the Editor.
Comparative American Studies. An International Journal
Volume 1 Issue 4 - Publication Date: 1 December 2003
‘America’ in Transit: The heresies of American Studies abroad
John Muthyala University of Southern Maine, USA
Challenging disenchantment: The discreet charm of occult TV
Kevin Glynn University of Canterbury, New Zealand
‘Traveling Barbies’ and rolling blackouts: Images of mobility in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding
Mita Banerjee University of Mainz, Germany
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and ‘ignorant, dirty, unsocial, restless, more than half-savage’
America
Robert Grant London, UK
Writing of home and home of writing: Chinese American diaspora and literary imagination
Da Zheng Suffolk University, USA
Abstracts available on line at:
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/JournalIssue.aspx?pid=105495&jiid=504765

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 32
Retrospect
AISNA Biennial Conference 2003
The Seventeenth International AISNA Conference, “Ambassadors. American Studies in a Changing
World” took place in Rome, at Centro Studi Americani, 6-8 November 2003. Plenary speakers were
Tiziano Bonazzi (Bologna), Amy Kaplan (Penn), Bart Eeckhout (Ghent). Workshops and panel
discussions addressed the development of American Studies in Italy and other topics. The opening
panel, Thirty Years of American Studis in Italy, offered an overview of Italian approaches to
America by distinguished scholars: Agostino Lombardo, Anna Maria Martellone, Biancamaria
Tedeschini Lalli, Sergio Perosa, and Stefania Piccinato.
The proceedings are to be published by Otto Editore of Turin.
Abstracts of Lectures
One Civilization, Divisible: Studying the United States from within the West
Tiziano Bonazzi
Università di Bologna
European Americanists, mediators between their national culture and the U.S. culture, do not work
in a vacuum, are not “unencumbered,” to use a fashionable word among Communitarian political
theorists. Rather, they are “situated” in a cultural setting, where today they have to come to terms
with the debate about the “end of Atlanticism,” if not even the “end of the West.” Beyond
immediate political issues, the debate is rooted in intellectual constructs, through which Europeans
have filled the “vacuum,” which for them had always been the American continent, starting from
the years of the “discovery” and colonisation. European expectations and concerns about this
“vacuum” were systematised by Adam Smith, who made of America the place enabling civilisation
– Europe led by Great Britain – to enter into a new and superior historical age, the age of trade and
commerce. The contemporary birth of the United States transferred to the new nation expectations,
hopes, and fears, previously linked to the entire continent; Europeans did not see the US as a state
among other states, but rather as a sort of stage, where the future of history was to be performed. At
the same time, the United States were “constructing” themselves as a nation, rejecting Europe and
setting themselves on the lofty grounds of freedom champions against the Old World’s tyranny and
traditionalism. Thus, a “Labyrinth” came to be construed, where Americans and Europeans alike
got lost: a paradigm hiding reality.
This reality has to do with the United States–and other states born in the American continent– being
part and parcel not of an abstract, indefinite Europe, but of the system of European states
consolidated after the Treaty of Westphalia. A Europe-system, and not a Europe-unity, composed of
diverse and progressively diversifying sovereign entities, necessarily united through dynamic and
changing ties. Up to the Second World War, notwithstanding the nationalistic ideology of
“American exceptionalism”–whose structure does not differ from European nationalisms–and the
concerned European view about America’s “difference,” the United States have been fully part
and parcel of that system. The specific “difference” construed in the United States within the system
has however enabled them to survive through the “European Civil War” of the twentieth century,
and to come out of it as world superpower. After 1945, Americans have ceased to need their
countering Europe as a defining sign of their nation; have freed themselves of the intellectual
paradigm of “Labyrinth” and in the fifty years of the Cold War, have replaced it with the paradigm
of “Western Civilisation,” to comprise Europe once again, as a past taking form in the U.S. socio-

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 33
political model. Europeans, instead, have long been trapped in the “Labyrinth,” in their looking at
the United States either as a hope or a threat, for a Europe still seeing itself as the core of the
historical development, in view of its being the matrix of the two ideologies confronting each other
during the Cold War.
With the demise of the Cold War, European Americanists could at last leave their Labyrinth, to
analyse the systemic nature of the relationship between the United States and European nations and
cultures, and act knowingly within the framework of a Europe which today is merely “region“ in
the international arena. The West has not ended, due to a tragic and unfortunate Euro-American
clash; but simply enough, for Europeans and Americans alike, the world out of which the Labyrinth
had originated, does not longer exist. We can therefore study the United States, their history,
literature and culture in new and more useful terms for the present.
Why Would the Spatial Be So Special? A Critical Analysis of the Spatial Turn in American
Studies
Bart Eeckhout
Ghent University & Catholic University of Brussels, Belgium
This concluding keynote address divided into three parts: (1) a general survey of the “spatial turn”
in critical theory across a variety of disciplines; (2) an identification of the role of spatial analytical
categories in traditional American Studies; (3) a discussion of the relationship between urban
studies, globalization studies, and American Studies and how a sensible engagement with the
former two disciplines may offer an alternative to a narrow application of the latter.
(1) In the first part, I set out to identify the “spatial turn” by looking at a wide range of cultural and
academic phenomena. This required the recollection of a number of widely circulating historical
and sociological metanarratives about the shift from modernity to postmodernity, as well as an
attention to the emergence — or enhanced influence — of certain academic disciplines. With
respect to the former, I argued that we should situate the recent popularity of spatial theories against
the background of a critical obsession with the “end of history”—first among cultural theorists of
postmodernity, then more widely among political philosophers and in the media after the end of the
Cold War. Especially a number of highly influential thinkers who came out of Marxism and shifted
the weight away from an historical to a more spatial analysis were highlighted. This group consists
of both an older and a younger generation. The former includes Henri Lefebvre, with among many
other books his standard work The Production of Space, and Michel Foucault in his later writings
about “heterotopias,” which start off from the idea that our “era . . . seems to be that of space.” The
younger generation is that of three major theorists of the postmodern condition: David Harvey, who
in The Condition of Postmodernity proposed the theory of a “time-space compression” in a post-
Fordist global economy as a result of which “time horizons” seem to “shorten to the point where the
present is all there is” and space becomes predominant; Fredric Jameson, with his more cultural
analysis of postmodernism and his conviction that our society is increasingly steered by a
“concupiscio oculis”; and Edward Soja, who in works like Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory explored how space is “filled with politics and
ideology.”
Such a post-Marxist interest in space as a focal point for critical analysis helps to explain also the
success of a theoretician of simulacra and hyperreality like Baudrillard or, more importantly, the
influence of the work of Michel de Certeau, whose already cult-status The Practice of Everyday Life
has stimulated widespread attention to how particular spatial practices construct identities and turn

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 34
space into lived place. In social theory at large, the emergence of various types of “social
constructionism” has arguably further abetted the kind of critical investigation that pays particular
attention to questions of spatial interaction, determination, positioning, and embodiment. Likewise,
in political theory, the category of the spatial has become central to discussions about
(post)nationalism and the power of nation-states, the nature of borders and boundaries, the
definition of cultural belonging, and so forth.
To all this should be added the growing success of a number of academic disciplines, both old and
new. Architectural theory and urban planning have come into their own and begun to exert a
widespread influence through some of their more high-profile practitioners. Both of these fields
have abetted the rise and influenced the concerns of the recently booming field of multidisciplinary
urban studies. Likewise, the newer disciplines of film studies and photography studies have shifted
the analytical weight in academia to the realm of the visual and hence, in some ways, the spatial.
Anne Friedberg has for instance argued that while “the social formations of modernity were
increasingly mediated through images,” this evolution has been stepped up in postmodernity, when
“the spatial displacements of a mobilized virtual gaze [have become] as much a part of the public
sphere as they are part of the private.” Cultural studies, too, with its attention to popular culture and
the everyday, has tended to favour material and visual artefacts over a traditional focus on historical
scenarios. Finally, postcolonial theory has raised much-debated questions of the role of
territoriality, diaspora, borderlands, and interstitiality — all principally spatial notions — in the
formation of transcultural and transnational identities.
(2) It should not be forgotten that in American Studies, too, critical investigations have long had
strong spatial components, witness the proverbial preference for space over history so deeply
entrenched in the American mind as well as the many exceptionalist theories about the American
landscape and its attendant mythology of spatial discovery, the frontier, and the move to the west.
Yet by necessity, the reading of spatial phenomena in American Studies has traditionally been
connected to the construction of a national, or at the most regional, identity, whose definition has
tended to transcend or obscure differences and contradictions within this identity, even if by now
many critics have become highly alert to these. Thus, for a long time, an investigation of the
character of American cities — for instance in the wake of the Chicago School of Sociology — was
all too easily translated into a totalizing narrative about the production of American
urbanites/citizens in general. And even if such totalizations are now widely resisted in American
Studies, many practitioners continue to pay little interest to the results of two critical disciplines that
have been booming since the 1990s, those of urban studies and of globalisation studies.
(3) The question should be asked to what extent the fields of urban studies and globalization studies
contain corrections to American Studies as traditionally conceived. Many of today’s most
interesting cultural commentators conspicuously bypass or downplay the stage of the nation-state
and its homogeneously labeled cultural features to look at either a smaller unit, that of the city, or a
larger one, that of the whole world — or more pertinently still, at the ways in which these two
levels interact. They opt for studying, rather, how processes of globalization (defined as the
accelerating global flow of goods, information, capital, and people) sediment and manifest
themselves on the ground in the socially most diverse, politically most conflictual, and statistically
fastest-growing of human settlement types, that of the city (which by now includes suburbia). They
seek to get a purchase on how the global and the local entangle to form the so-called glocal. Indeed,
globalization studies constantly require — or even derive from — an attention to the local, to the
immediate material and social environment, which alone can manifest the abstract processes of
globalization. The city appears to have become the favorite locus of investigation in this respect, the
principal site where multicultural struggles over identity and representation take place and
transnationalism is enacted on a daily basis. As Liam Kennedy argues, the city has by now been

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 35
“demythologized and positioned as a site of spatial formations produced across diverse discursive
regimes and everyday practices”; it has come to function as “a point of convergence for work
emerging from the disciplinary meltdown of the humanities and, to a lesser extent, of the social
sciences.” Increasing inter- and multidisciplinarity forces a younger generation of scholars to think
and work outside earlier disciplinary boundaries, so that “American Studies” often comes to
function less as an overarching umbrella than as an ancillary discipline that can inform the newer
critical debates surrounding the postnational production, politics, and representation of space and
the decentering of traditional boundaries.
American Studies and the Question of Empire Today
Amy Kaplan
President, American Studies Association
Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
In this address, the president of the American Studies Association urged scholars in the field to
address the current international crisis. The paper explored the changing relationship between
language and space in contemporary political debates in the United States, focusing on three key
words: empire, the homeland, and Guantánamo. Since 11 September 2001 there has been a striking
shift in public discourse from the denial to the embrace of the idea of the American Empire. She
traced two dominant narratives, one that loudly champions U.S. military supremacy, and another
that reluctantly accepts the “white man’s burden” as the last best cure of global anarchy. Both
narratives take American exceptionalism to new heights. Since the American Empire is “out of the
closet” as its proponents claim, American studies scholars must go beyond the methodology of
exposure to recast these debates about empire in transnational, historical and comparative contexts.
The recent use of the word homeland to refer to the nation contributes to this imperial discourse, as
it works to shore up the boundaries between the foreign and the domestic. The support for a global
empire, however, breaks them down by claiming the supreme authority for the United States to
limit the sovereignty of all other nations. The jarring notion of America as “the homeland” imposes
an illusion of national consensus and homogeneity, which underwrites resurgent nativism and antiimmigrant
sentiment and policy. It also appropriates ethnic connotations of homeland as something
violently taken away or not yet achieved to enhance a sense of insecurity and support for the socalled
“war on terror.”
Kaplan urged American studies scholars and teachers to muster the authority of their discipline to
engage in public debates about the history of the American empire and about the multiple meanings
of “America,” at a time when the government is reviving American studies as an export to support
foreign policy.
As a key example, she turned to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a pressing contemporary location about
which American studies should tell alternative narratives of empire from a variety of
interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. An ambiguous space between the domestic and the
foreign, the U.S. naval base there holds over 600 international prisoners indefinitely in a
nightmarish legal limbo, where they are denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and the U. S.
Constitution. American studies scholars can show how Guantánamo, America’s oldest overseas
naval base, lies at a historical crossroads, where U.S. intervention in the Caribbean meets U.S.
intervention in the Middle East, and where nineteenth century imperialism meets the American
Empire of the twenty-first.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 36
Workshop Reports
Workshop 1: Italian American Cultural Representations of Italy
(Giuliana Muscio, John Paul Russo)
This panel for the third straight AISNA conference, co-chaired by Giuliana Muscio and John Paul
Russo (Miami, Florida), consisted of five papers. Andrea Carosso (Torino) led off with a paper on
“Simulations of Italy in Contemporary North America: Las Vegas and other non places,” in which
he examined the fictionalization of Italian space in contemporary American culture. He drew his
examples from the many Italian-themed Las Vegas casinos (e.g., the Bellagio, the Venetian) and the
Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans. Then, Simona Frasca (Napoli Federico II) read a paper entitled “An
Example of Musical Syncretism: The Emigration of Neapolitan Popular Song to the United States
at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” She
explored the migration of the Neapolitan popular song tradition and its many exponents to America
and the corresponding influence of American music on Neapolitan song. Pursuing the theme of
cultural migration, Giuliana Muscio
gave a paper entitled “Santa Lucia Luntana and the Italian American Film Production in New York
in the Early 1930s” in which she investigated how Italian American culture worked in continuity
with the popular musical and theatrical Italian traditions, “americanizing” them in the process of
adaptation. Among the composers who wrote sceneggiatas made into movies was Francesco
Pennino, Francis Ford Coppola’s grandfather. In Godfather II there is a scene in a small theatre in
Little Italy in which Robert DeNiro sits through a sceneggiata,
listening to a song taken from Pennino’s most famous work, Senza mamma e’nammurato (1932).
Federico Siniscalco’s (Siena) documentary paper, “In the ‘Old Country’: Memories to Pass On”
illustrates, through
video-interviews and other video footage, how older Italian Americans who emigrated to the shores
of Lake Erie, and their immediate
descendents, represent Italy and Italian culture to the younger generations. This region of New York
attracted a large number of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century and the following
decades. Maria Anita Stefanelli (Roma Tre) concluded the panel presentations with a paper on
“Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Surreal
Migrations.’” After focusing on Ferlinghetti’s family background and his “genetic” connection to
Italy, Stefanelli follows his physical and
imaginary journies “home” and analyzes the self-construction of his ethnicity and the cultural
representations of Italy emerge in his poetry.
Workshop 2: Transatlantic Communication and the Unmaking of the World
(Salvatore Proietti, Igina Tattoni)
The twin categories proposed in the title of our workshop elicited a wide range of responses from
contributors, discussing manifold links between different forms of contact with non-American
otherness and different types of apocalypses (as well as hoped-for rebirths).
During our first session, Antonella D’amore (Università di Roma 1) analyzed the viewpoints of
Bruce Springsteen’s most recent songs, in which religious and political apocalyptic scenarios
(including those inspired by 9/11) are juxtaposed with a firm commitment to the validity of a
multiracial American Dream. Other papers focused on “ethnic” revisions of standard versions of the
melting-pot ideal. Marina De Chiara (Università di Napoli IUO) discussed the work of Spanish
American performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, whose work on the early

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 37
colonization of North America is aimed at displacing all exotic-nostalgic illusions of distance from
that violent experience. Felice De Cusatis (Università di Roma 3) analyzed Susan Sontag’s In
America, a highly sophisticated novel which problematizes the traumatic (self-)deconstruction and
reconstruction of the immigrant artist’s identity. Elèna Mortara (Università di Roma 2) provided an
insightful reading of Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life, with a special, and in some ways surprising,
emphasis on the relation between fact and fiction.
During our second session, three contributors dealt with more canonical authors. Sonia Di Loreto
(Rutgers University) analyzed the exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
in the aftermath of the Revolution, striving to construct new forms of authority and
representativeness adequate to the newborn nation. Giuseppe lombardo (Università di Messina)
focused on Herman Melville’s Israel Potter, in which the Revolution is the historical stage for a
drama of foundation and homelessness, with the transatlantic expatriate as ironic hero-type for the
US. Cinzia Schiavini (Università di Milano) explored the urban theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s short
stories, showing how Poe’s European and US cities are the estranging setting for a reflection on the
precarious nature of democracy and modernity. Giorgio Mariani (Università di Roma 1) provided a
reading of the late James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a novel which reverses the
standard pattern of the captivity narrative creating an ironic dialectic of identity and violence, of
myth and reality. Salvatore Proietti (Roma) focused on W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
and on some of his novels, positing the contradictory, liminal, “double” identity of the African
American self as bodily and cultural ambassadors across continents, providing a template that
informs many other cultural African American texts (from literature to comics). In conclusion, Igina
Tattoni (Università di Roma 1) emphasized the importance of the “unmaking” in the
communication process, crucial to Thomas Merton’s religious and political production in the
historical context of the 1960s political crises.
Two more contributors could not be present in Rome: the topic of William Boelhower (Università
di Padova) was the construction of otherness in immigrant autobiography, while that of Paola
Castellucci (Università di Roma 1) was the theme of “virtual” communication in Don De Lillo’s
and Henry Roth’s works.
Workshop 3: U.S. Mediatic Ambassadors From the Cowboy to the DJ: Towards a
Hermeneutic of Pop Icons?
(Luca Briasco, Umberto Rossi)
Since the title of our workshop was a question we would like to start by answering that yes, what all
participants attempted was indeed an interpretation of typically American pop icons, and all
succeeded in interpreting those icons, though the hermeneutic tools varied greatly.
On the first morning Mattia Carratello (Fanucci Editore) dealt with the figure of the confidence-man
and confidence games from Herman Melville’s classic to a group of recent US films, carrying out
an interesting analysis based on an accurate and well-reconstructed historical background. Peter
Gardner (Saint Mary’s College Rome Program) analysed the figure of working-class members in
some popular US TV serials as an invisible icon, since in US media “workers mimic middle-class
values and are reassuringly similar.” Paolo Prezzavento (Ascoli Piceno) dealt with the icon of
Billy the Kid, the most famous outlaw in the history of the USA, analysing the sexual ambiguities
of this character. Umberto Rossi (independent critic and translator) carried out a political reading of

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 38
the DJ and the talk radio host by focusing on Oliver Stone’s film Talk Radio and the assassination
of Alan Berg, a popular talk radio host. Roberta Fornari (Università di Roma 1) outlined the figure
of the tycoon in a series of US films from Chaplin’s City Lights to Stone’s Wall Street with a
reading based on Marxist theories. On the second morning Professor Pierre Lagayette (Université
de Paris 4-Sorbonne), explored the ethnical implication of the gangster as depicted in two famous
classics of US cinema, Scarface and Bugsy. Luca Briasco (Fanucci Editore) anatomised the
American baseball hero in films and fiction, outlining the political implications of this figure when
read as a role model. Valerio M. De Angelis (Università di Macerata) interpreted the superheroes in
US comic books as ambiguous ambassadors of American values, in connection to 9-11 and other
recent historical events. The workshop was closed by Stephen Perrin (Liverpool Hope University
College), who analyzed the massmediatic myth of Charles “Satana” Manson as the ultimate, allencompassing
pop icon, a far-from-flattering self-portrait of contemporary US.
Workshop 4: Ambassadors within/from the Academy
(Giovanna Franci, Franco Minganti)
The panel, co-chaired by Giovanna Franci and Franco Minganti (Università di Bologna), opened an
investigation on the functions of cultural mediation as played by American Studies, Italian-
American Studies, and Italian Cultural Studies — as well as by Universities, Italian Institutes
abroad and Embassies. The panelists presented and discussed various angles on such roles as
“interpreters” and “translators” of American culture in Italy, Europe at large, and Eastern Europe —
specifically Rumania (Mihaila) —, played by the academy in the context of international exchanges
and globalization (Franci). Some focussed also on the related aspect of Italian academicians often
acting as “promoters” of Italian culture in the United States, or else with specific communities of
American students attending university exchange programs in Italy (Minganti), while a
crosscultural perspective came the other way around, with American Virgils who guide American
students to and around Italy, supported by successful exchange programs (Bernheim). If the
importance of an ever present comparative, intercultural approach was stressed in teaching cultural
topics related to everyday life situations, the discussion on a sound ethical commitment to diversity
and tolerance was introduced (Waldbaum), with reference to the program of the International
Center for Civic Engagement jointly promoted by the Universities of Denver and Bologna.
Papers: Mark Bernheim (Miami University, Ohio), “The Introduction of Italian Cultural Identities
into the Curriculum of a Midwestern State University through Educational Exchange”; Giovanna
Franci, “Roaming International Ambassadors: The Impact of Faculty and Student Exchange in a
Globalized World”; Rodica Mihaila (University of Bucharest), “Beyond Cultural Diplomacy:
Creating American Studies Programs in post-Communist Eastern Europe”; Franco Minganti, “On
Teaching Italian Cultural Studies for English-Speaking Student Communities”; Roberta Waldbaum
(University of Denver), “When the Other Becomes Us: Ethics, Social Responsibility, and
International Service Learning.”
Workshop 5: Democracy in America After Two Centuries
(Ferdinando Fasce, Alessandra Lorini)
Recent discussions among historians and social scientists on the problems that democracy is
currently facing within the Western world were at the root of this workshop, that has analysed some
crucial, and yet until now understudied, aspects of American democracy in the last century. Moving
beyond traditional institutional perspectives and mixing cultural and political history, presenters
have cast light on the multifaceted processes of inclusion/exclusion, based on gender, race, and
class, characterizing the American century. Filling a gap in the available literature, Raffaella
Baritono (University of Bologna) focused on the active role played by U.S. women reformers in the

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 39
first four decades of the twentieth century in promoting an agenda of participatory democracy based
on racial and social justice and predicated on a fluid and flexible notion of leadership. Elisabetta
Vezzosi (University of Trieste) dealt with the ambiguous relationship between democratic rhetoric
and practice in the most recent developments of welfare reform, showing the complex dynamics of
continuity and discontinuity along gender and race lines that such developments betray when read
against the previous record of welfare history. Moving back to the interwar period, Daria Frezza
(University of Siena) illustrated how discussions on race lay at the very centre of American public
discourse on democracy and citizenship and how such a long-term imprinting lingers on in the
current initiatives of racial profiling associated with the Patriot Act. Rescuing from oblivion the
American audience’s response to a series of global broadcasts of the popular radio programme
America’s Town Meeting of the Air, Ferdinando Fasce (University of Genoa) complicated the
image of how the United States related to the world at the beginning of the cold war. Race, gender
and controversial processes of “Americanization” and exportation of democracy underpinned
Alessandra Lorini’s (University of Florence) presentation on the discussions and educational
programs concerning Cuba and the Philippines, developed by social scientists and such educational
institutions as Harvard, in the wake of the “splendid little war” of 1898.
Workshop 6: What Was Modernism?
(Stefano M. Casella, Gregory Dowling)
The workshop showed that the title-question might have been more accurately reformulated as:
“what has Modernism been?” or “what is Modernism today?” Its shadow still projects itself on our
critical conscience, half a century after its creative parabola and a few decades after its great critical
success (other “–isms” having, in the meantime, intervened, post-Modernism in particular). The
critical debate still continues, and the workshop testified to its lively actuality. The papers ranged
from theoretical approaches and discussions (Culler, Bush, Araujo) to practical readings (Francini,
Loreto, Nardi), with a final consideration of the particular problems of translation (Molesini).
The group of three theoretical studies opens with Jonathan Culler’s brief but extremely thoughtful
redrawing of chronological boundaries and forefathers, in an effort to decide where the “break“
should come: 1848 or 1856 (with the move from Balzac and Hugo to Baudelaire and Flaubert);
1890 (with Hardy, Conrad, Freud); or Virginia Woolf’s famous definition of 1910. Culler considers
all the issues connected with these various key-dates and concludes with a fascinating discussion of
Frederic Jameson’s thesis that the so-called “ideology” of Modernism – the notion of an art that
could save us from chaos – was in fact developed and imposed after the Second World War by
Americans; Culler takes Jameson’s point further, encouraging us not to allow the ideology to
distract us from the realities of “sex and death that suffuse the lives and works” that are the object
of our study.
Ron Bush shifts the focus to the first two decades of the 20 th century and the fundamental phase of
Imagism. He discusses the way Pound inherited and elaborated Mallarmé’s and Verlaine’s
aesthetics and considers, on a wider scale, the importance of Symbolism as filtered via Arthur
Symons, whose book of 1899 influenced both Eliot and Yeats. Bush’s essay is in essence a
stimulating study of the various internal contradictions within Modernist poetics, which were
developed as a response to the conflicting demands for a poetry uncontaminated by public speech,
which could associate itself with the energies of the body and yet not lay itself open to the charge of
unintellectuality and effeteness. In this closely argued paper, Bush helps us to understand how it is
that Imagism has come to be associated both with the radically modern and the radically antimodern.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 40
Anderson Araujo finally discusses the two other fundamental “off-shoots” of Modernism: Futurism
and Vorticism, and their different approaches to the Past, Tradition, the Present (and the Future).
Araujo is determined to go beyond the usual conclusions of studies that attempt to “yoke together”
the two movements, which either present Futurism as merging into Vorticism or recast “both as
crosscurrents of the modernist aesthetic.” Araujo’s reading of the two movements is based both on
readings of key-texts, such as Blast and Marinetti’s Manifesto, and on perceptive studies of major
works, concluding with an astute reflection on Epstein’s Rock-Drill, which he sees as the artist’s
renunciation of “his faith in the machine-mediated universe celebrated in Futurism.”
Paola Nardi’s paper examines Marianne Moore’s “ambiguous relationship” to Modernism.
Focusing on the writer’s representation of the city and on her fondness for spatial patterns in the
organisation of her poems, Nardi shows both the features that connect her with her contemporaries
and the way she managed to remain splendidly and defiantly distinctive. Moore’s achievement as
Modernist, according to Nardi, lay in her ability to innovate not by breaking the rules but by taking
them to extreme, even eccentric, limits and then doggedly abiding by them.
Antonella Francini’s paper revives interest in one of the “lost” figures of Modernism, Mina Loy.
She focuses on her unpublished prose works, in particular the various novel-drafts which Francini
suggests were all parts of a single book that kept growing in the author’s hands. The novel is clearly
a roman à clef, presenting the author herself and her encounters with figures from the cultural world
of the 20 th century; its interest lies in the fact that it shows how Loy never wavered in her devotion
to one single concern: “the birth of the modern artist and of a modern artistic language as an
allegory of the self’s change in sensibility and perspective.”
Paola Loreto, presenting the contemporary poet, Amy Newman, shows us how Modernism is far
more than a historical phenomenon. As she sees it, the movement is a “permanent attempt to
elaborate an aesthetic able to cope with a revolutionary change in Western epistemology.” She
establishes a poetic lineage in American literature that begins with Emerson and passes via
Dickinson, Stevens and Wilbur to a contemporary group of poets, including Jorie Graham, Matthea
Harvey and Newman herself. Though living in a Post-Modernist age, the challenge for such artists
remains the same: to mirror, through their art, the fragmentation of a reality that can never be
known. The paper provides an extremely sensitive reading of Newman’s poetics, revealing the
direct line of heritage from Stevens, whose concern with the encounter between imagination and
reality is shared by Newman.
The final paper provides illumination on the art of poetic translation. Andrea Molesini explains the
rationale behind his version of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, a work which, while not strictly in the
Modernist vein, presents some of the problems of density and complexity of expression associated
with the movement. Molesini, who takes as his maxim, “Go in fear of abstraction,” offers not only
general observations on the necessary art of compromise that the translator has to learn but also
gives us keen insights into the quality and texture of Walcott’s verse. The group of essays thus
concludes with a paper that achieves a successful balance between the stimulatingly theoretical and
the bracingly practical, reflecting the aim of the workshop as a whole.
Workshop 7: Ambassadors from Within: the International Critical Impact of African
American Studies
(Paola Boi, M.Giulia Fabi)
The aim of this workshop was to illustrate the many inspiring ways in which African Americans
became ambassadors of a culture whose status and dignity had been denied for centuries. The five
speakers offered faceted perspectives of the epistemological challenge posed by African American

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 41
philosophers and critics on the interpretation of American culture, producing a lively and intense
discussion. The towering figure of W.E.B. Du Bois was recalled in the introductory remarks as one
of the best embodiments of the liaison between Europe and the U.S. “The American Negro
Exhibit,” brought to Paris in 1900 by Du Bois, was an important event to celebrate the African
American presence in Europe. With this event Du Bois worked against dominant white supremacist
images of African Americans winning the 1900 Exhibit Prize, but also disrupting the discursive
foundation of white middle class dominance, destabilizing oppositional paradigms, and finally
challenging the discourses and images that produced and imagined a Negro criminality and
propelled the crime of lynching.
Resistance “beyond human limits” and challenge to brutal physical and psychological domination
was the subject of the first presentation by Sandro Portelli. Portelli proposed a very original and
inspiring comparison between Frederick Douglass’s attitudes towards the discriminations of history
during slavery and those lived by Primo Levi at Auschwitz. Materialized and dematerialized
concepts of slavery were witnessed by both Douglas and Levi, through what Portelli identified as a
slavery of body (Douglass) and slavery of soul (Levi). He discussed the many ways Levi and
Douglass configured new and intriguing paradigms between the physical and the metaphysical, the
specific and the universal, the human and the animal, or between the demolition and the
reconstruction of the human, even when the space between metaphor and resistance was annulled.
The strong emotional impact conveyed by Portelli’s presentation, led to the second intervention by
Emil Sirbulescu (Univ. of Craiova, Romania) who deftly outlined the impact of African American
Studies in the communist and post-communist perception of race in Romania.
Christopher Mulvey (King Alfred’s College, Winchester) recalled the pre-Civil War patterns of
movements which were set by remarkable African Americans in Europe, especially throughout the
United Kingdom and Ireland around the 1840s.
Dominique Marçais (Université d’Orléans) outlined the strong impact of contemporary African
American critical discourse in setting new models of interpretation of Moby Dick and Benito
Cereno. Marçais’s lively and stimulating presentation showed how these works singled out the
interrelated lines that connect blacks and whites in the novel, the mixed linguistic codes and masks
that problematize the narration and make the representation of the black man in the novel an added
value.
Annalucia Accardo presented a paper on Grace Paley and the problematics of “passing” in both
Jewish and African American women. The centrality of women’s discourse and their ironic
committment against intolerance was asserted with force by Accardo, who mixed passion and
competence in stressing the feminist experience of subjection and the intercession of tolerance,
always highlighting the creative relation that characterized these artistic experiences.
Workshop 8: AISNA at Thirty: Aspects and Breakthroughs of American Studies in Italy
(Massimo Bacigalupo)
Thirty years of American studies in Italy were discussed in six papers. The first, given jointly by
Luca Codignola, Nando Fasce and Matteo Sanfilippo covered “Thirty Years of American History in
Italy,” speaking of the old masters of the discipline, the various schools, and more and less recent
developments. It was a well-conducted and streamlined tour of a rich field. Renzo Crivelli provided
a portrait of Rolando Anzilotti, prime mover of AISNA, and well remembered especially for his
translations and criticism of Robert Lowell. Fedora Giordano drew an attractive account of that
magus of Italian American Studies, Elemire Zolla, and Gabriella Morisco evoked a most simpatico
and perceptive scholar and writer, Glauco Cambon. Massimo Bacigalupo gave an account of the

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 42
crucial Pound-Izzo correspondence and friendship, and Francesco Pontuale discussed Italian
histories of American literature. The seminar was a good occasion of taking stock and see (in
James’ phrase) “where in a manner of speaking we have got to.”

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 43
Members’ Publications
Antonelli, Sara. Rinascita di una nazione. Le scrittrici americane e la Guerra civile. Roma:
Bulzoni, 2004.
Ascari, Maurizio. Ed. Katherine Mansfield. Felicità. Tr. Marina Mascagni. Venezia: Marsilio,
2004.
Bacigalupo, Massimo. “Aforisma e umorismo in America.” L’aforisma. Forme brevi fra antico e
moderno. Atti del XIX Convegno internazionale. Ed. Premi Internazionali Ennio Flaiano. Pescara:
EDIARS, 2003. 63-74.
—. “Un’allegra famiglia.” Rev. Masolino d’Amico, Persone speciali. Indice 9 (September 2004):
28.
—. “America in Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Cantos.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.1-2 (2003):
90-98.
—. “Bisanzio e Florida. Le rotte contrarie di W.B. Yeats e Wallace Stevens.” Da Ulisse a... Il
viaggio nelle terre d'oltremare. Ed. Giorgetta Revelli. Pisa: ETS, 2004. 203-213.
—. Ed. Dylan Thomas. Lettere d’amore. Milano: Guanda, 2004.
—. Ed. Emily Dickinson. Poesie. Rev. edition. (Ist ed. 1995.) Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
—. Ed. Emily Dickinson. Poesie d’amore. Tr. Margherita Guidacci. Milano: Bompiani, 2004.
— et al. Eds. Genova per noi. Testimonianze di scrittori contemporanei. Genova: Accademia
Ligure di Scienze e Lettere, 2004. (Collana di Studi e Ricerche, 31.)
—. “Giovanni Giudici. Osanna e intimo sussurro.” Poesia 186 (2004): 19-21.
—. Intro. Antologia della poesia americana. Ed. Antonella Francini. Roma: Gruppo Editoriale
L’Espresso – Divisione La Repubblica, 2004. 11-95.
—. Intro. Ezra Pound e il Canto dei Sette Laghi. Ed. Maria Costanza Ferrero De Luca. Reggio
Emilia: Diabasis, 2004. vii-xi.
—. “Pound ritorna in Idaho.” Ricerca Research Recherche 8 (2002): 15-24.
—. Rev. Gregory Dowling. Someone’s Road Home. Wallace Stevens Journal 28.2 (2004): 337-339.
—. Rev. Luca Clerici, Apparizione e visione: vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese. MLR 99.3 (2004):
806-807.
—. Rev. Stephen G. Yao. Translation and the Languages of Modernism. Clio 33.3 (2004): 350-357.
—. “Ricordando l’Albergo Croce di Malta e i suoi ospiti.” Genova città narrata. Ed. Silvio Riolfo
Marengo, Beppe Manzitti. Milano: Viennepierre edizioni, 2003. I: 43-47.
—. “Ricordo di Edward Said.” Resine 25.98 (ottobre-dicembre 2003): 111-112.
—. “Scoprendo Beowulf con Seamus Heaney.” I Germani e gli altri. Ed. Vittoria Dolcetti Corazza,
Renato Gendre. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003. 179-94.
—. “Vita comune e straordinaria.” Rev. Elio Nissim, Il pappagallo del nonno. Indice 10 (October
2004): 19.
—. “Wallace Stevens and Two Types of Vanity.” Wallace Stevens Journal 28.2 (2004): 235-239.
Baritono, Raffaella. “Le first ladies nella storia americana.” Ricerche di Storia Politica 7.2 (2004):
173-203.
—. “John Dewey.” La politica e gli Stati. Problemi e figure del pensiero occidentale. Ed. R.
Gherardi. Roma: Carocci, 2004. 293-303.
—. “Il pensiero politico delle donne.” La politica e gli Stati. Problemi e figure del pensiero
occidentale. Ed. R. Gherardi. Roma: Carocci, 2004. 61-70.
—. “ ‘A Thin Red Line’: The Public and Private Spheres in the Democratic Reflection of American
Women Social Scientists Between the Progressive Era and the 1920s.” Public and Private in

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 44
American History. State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Raffaella Baritono et al.
Torino: Otto Editore, 2003. 185-216.
—. “‘Unexplored Trajectories’: Gender e potere nell’America di fine millennio.” America Today.
Highways and Labyrinths. Ed. Gigliola Nocera. Siracusa: Grafià Editrice, 2003. 463-72.
—, Elisabetta Vezzosi. “Gli studi di storia americana tra Italia e Stati Uniti.” A che punto è la storia
delle donne in Italia. Ed. A. Rossi-Doria. Roma: Viella, 2003. 145-168.
Bartocci, Clara. Ed. and intro. La città multietnica nella seconda metà del Novecento. Napoli: ESI,
2004. 7-21.
—. “Immagini e storie della multietnica Brooklyn nei film di Paul Auster e Spike Lee.” Napoli:
ESI, 2004. 189-217.
Bergamini, Oliviero. Democrazia in America?Il sistema politico e sociale degli Stati Uniti.
Verona: Ombre Corte, 2004.
Bisutti de Riz, Francesca. Ed and Intro. “Stranieri e foresti a Venezia.” Quaderni. Documenti sulla
manutenzione urbana di Venezia 18.6 (April 2004).
Bottalico, Michele. “Il personaggio nel romanzo sentimentale statunitense.” Il personaggio in
letteratura. Ed. Maria Teresa Chialant. Napoli: ESI, 2004. 185-93.
—. Ed. Rudolfo Anaya. Il silenzio della pianura. Bari: Palomar, 2004.
—, R. Maria Grillo. Eds. Culture a contatto nelle Americhe. Salerno: Oédipus, 2003. (Contributors
to the Hispanic American Section: Antonella Cancellier, Alessandra Riccio, Romolo Santoni.
Contributors to the Anglo-American Section: Paola Boi, Marie-Hélène Laforest, Alejandro
Morales, John Paul Russo, Luigi Sampietro).
Buonomo, Leonardo. “A New York State of Mind: Henry James’s ‘Crapy Cornelia’ and ‘A Round
of Visits.” Public Space, Private Lives: Race, Gender, Class and Citizenship in New York, 1890-
1929. Ed. William Boelhower, Anna Scacchi. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004. 341-348.
—. “The Ways of Fiction: Storytelling Goes to Court in Cooper’s Last Novel.” A Goodly
Garlande: in onore di Sergio Perosa. Ed. A. Cagidemetrio, R. Mamoli Zorzi. Annali di Ca’ Foscari
42 (2003): 67-82.
—. “A Woman’s Face: Evaluating Beauty in Glasses.” Henry James Today: Selected Papers. Igitur
4 (2003): 47-58.
Cagliero, Roberto. Ed. Fantastico Poe. Verona: Ombrecorte, 2004.
Il mito di Edgar Allan Poe, che le traduzioni di Baudelaire consacrarono come lo scrittore più “europeo“ d’America,
continua da oltre 150 anni ad attirare lettori e studiosi. Dopo le interpretazioni psicanalitiche e strutturaliste, Poe è diventato
oggetto di un approccio neostoricistico e di studi sui rapporti tra le razze in letteratura, centrali per l’opera di uno scrittore
vissuto a lungo in quel Sud fondato sull’economia schiavista. A partire da tali suggestioni i contributi qui raccolti affrontano
il fenomeno Poe secondo ottiche diverse. La prima sezione mostra come la storia non risulti estranea a un autore
tradizionalmente associato al fantastico. Nei saggi sulla poesia si analizzano singoli testi e gli influssi di Poe su altri autori,
mentre per i racconti sono affrontati problemi di traduzione e temi della memoria, del doppio, dello stile e della
metamorfosi. La sezione sulle arti studia le opere di Alberto Martini e di altri illustratori; le trasposizioni filmiche di Epstein,
Corman, Beaumont e Fellini; infine, l’influsso di Poe su compositori di epoche diverse. Ulteriore oggetto di indagine è
costituito dalle risonanze poesche sulla letteratura italiana fino ai giorni nostri, lungo una parabola che tocca Tarchetti,
Salgari, Vittorini, Calvino e Bulgheroni. Conclude il volume una bibliografia che raccoglie i contributi critici italiani dal 1960
ai nostri giorni. Interventi di G. Balestra, O. Bergamini, G. Bottiroli, M. Bulgheroni, R. Cagliero, M. Cecchinato, R. Fioraso,
N. Gardini, A. Golahny, G.J. Kennedy, R. Kopley, G. Manfredi, S. Monti, N. Pireddu, F. Piva, F. Ronzon, U. Rubeo, G.
Sandrini, N. Sanvido, B. Tarozzi, C. Venturi.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 45
Camboni, Marina. Ed. Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America. Towards a
Re-Writing of Cultural History, 1890-1939. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 2004.
Carboni, Guido. “Democrazia dell’inconscio.” Rev. Alessandro Portelli. Canoni americani. Indice
10 (October 2004): 19.
Cartosio, Bruno. Gli Stati Uniti contemporanei (1865-2002). Firenze: Giunti, 2002.
—. Ed. “New York: metropoli, modernità e avanguardia.” Arcipelago. Rivista di studi letterari
dell’Università di Bergamo, 1 (2002). This issue includes: “New York: metropoli, modernità e avanguardia.
Introduzione” (11-20) and “Il gusto del nuovo: la “New New York del primo anteguerra” (53-92).
—. “Enron, WorldCom & Co.: il capitalismo dei clan.” Ácoma. Rivista internazionale di studi
nordamericani 24 (2002): 4-19.
—. “Appunti di lettura e considerazioni su informazione, potere, ‘impero’ e fine della storia.”
Ácoma. Rivista internazionale di studi nordamericani 22 (2002): 49-57.
—. Contadini e operai in rivolta. Le Gorras blancas in New Mexico. Milano: Shake Ed., 2003.
—. “The Meaning of Memory: Individual and Collective, Public and Private in the History of the
Oppressed Groups in the United States.” Public and Private in American History: State, Family,
Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century. Ed. R. Baritono et al. Torino: Otto Editore, 2003: 367-96.
—. “Il fronte interno.” La Rivista del Manifesto 37 (2003): 12-16.
—. “La California manda a dire.” La Rivista del Manifesto 44 (2003): 34-37.
Casella, Stefano M. “‘And as to who will copy this palimpsest’. Ezra Pound, Canti postumi.”
Ricerca Research Recherche 8 (2002): 65-81.
Clericuzio, Alessandro. “Norma e Fedora. Fenomenologia della diva hollywoodiana secondo Billy
Wilder.” Donne d’America. Studi in onore di B. Tedeschini Lalli. Ed. Cristina Giorcelli, Palermo:
ila palma, 2003. 115-29.
—. “Theater, Sex and Censorship: The Case of Mae West.” Public Space, Private Lives. Ed.
William Boelhower, Anna Scacchi. Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 2004. 323-30.
Crivelli, Renzo S. Intro. Dylan Thomas. Poesie. Torino: Einaudi, 2002.
D’Amore, Antonella “Gioielli sepolti e fiori nascosti.” I Quaderni di Yseos – Rivista di psicologia
e cultura 1 (1998): 223-33.
—. “Il tema dell’infanzia in Huckleberry Finn di Mark Twain.” I Quaderni di Yseos – Rivista di
psicologia e cultura 2 (1999): 142-51.
—. “Due canzoni per una città: ‘American Skin’ e ‘My City Of Ruins,’ di Bruce Springsteen.”
Ácoma. Rivista internazionale di studi nordamericani 22 (2002): 38-48.
—. Mia città di rovine. L’America di Bruce Springsteen. Intr. Alessandro Portelli. Manifestolibri,
Roma, 2002.
Daniele, Daniela. Ed. Mary Caponegro. Materia primma. Roma: Leconte editore, 2004.
De Angelis, Valerio Massimo. “Angels’ Ghosts: Wolfe and Stephen King.” Look Homeward and
Forward: Thomas Wolfe, an American Voice Across Modern and Contemporary Culture. Ed.
Agostino Lombardo et al. Roma: Editrice La Sapienza, 2003. 63-76.
—. “Diverging Trajectories?: The Freewoman vs./and the Women’s Suffrage
Movement.” Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America. Towards a Re-Writing
of Cultural History, 1890-1939. Ed. Marina Camboni. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 2004.
199-212.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 46
—. “Fiedler e Shakespeare.” Shakespeare e il Novecento. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Roma: Bulzoni,
2002. 59-73
—. “A Labyrinth of Lost Highways: The Strategy of Selection and Exclusion in the Canonization of
Early Modernism.” America Today: Highways and Labyrinths. Ed. Gigliola Nocera. Siracusa:
Grafià, 2002.
—. “L’incubo della realtà: ‘Young Goodman Brown’ di Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Sogno e racconto:
Archetipi e funzioni. Ed. Gabriele Cingolani, Marco Riccini. Firenze: Le Monnier, 2003. 266-274.
—. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Il romanzo e la storia. Roma: Bulzoni, 2004
—. La prima lettera: Miti dell’origine in The Scarlet Letter di Nathaniel Hawthorne. Roma: Lozzi
& Rossi, 2001.
—. “Lo sguardo del boia: The Green Mile di Stephen King.” Ácoma 25 (2003): 44-51.
—. Caterina Ricciardi, Valerio Massimo De Angelis. Eds. Voci dagli Stati Uniti: Prosa e poesia e
teatro del secondo Novecento. Roma: Università La Sapienza, 2004.
Del Pero, Mario. “America-Europa: un alleato scomodo per un continente vecchio?” Working
Paper, Fondazione Ruffilli, Guaraldi Editore, 2003.
—. “L’antifascismo nella politica estera statunitense.” Ed. Alberto De Bernardi and Paolo Ferrari.
L’antifascismo nella costruzione dell’identità europea . Roma: Carocci, 2004.
—. “Containing Containment: Rethinking Italy’s Experience During the Cold War.” Journal of
Modern Italian Studies 4, October-December 2003.
—. “John F. Kennedy: oltre il mito.” Millenovecento. Mensile di Storia Contemporanea, May
2003.
—. “I neoconservatori e l’Europa in prospettiva storica.” Ed. Giuseppe Vacca. L’Unità
dell’Europa. Rapporto 2004 sull’integrazione europea. Bari: Dedalo, 2004.
—. “The Role of Covert Operations in US Cold War Foreign Policy.” Eds. Heike Bungert, Jan G.
Heitmann and Michael Wala. Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. London: Frank Cass,
2003.
—. “Stati Uniti e Legge Truffa.” Contemporanea 3 (July 2003).
De Luca, Daniele. “Gli Stati Uniti tra strategia globale e nuovi teatri di confronto. La politica
militare americana in Medio Oriente da Truman a Kennedy.” Per Carlo Ghisalberti. Miscellanea di
studi. Ed. Ester Capuzzo, Enrico Maserati. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2003.
Donno, Antonio. “Hamas e l’islamizzazione del mondo.” Acque & Terre 14.4-5 (2003): 8-10.
—. In nome della libertà. Conservatorismo americano e guerra fredda. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2004.
—. “Le radici del neo-conservatorismo americano.” MondOperaio 9 (2004): 102-115.
—. “Proto-sionismo e primi sviluppi del sionismo politico negli Stati Uniti.” Per Carlo Ghisalberti.
Miscellanea di studi. Ed. Ester Capuzzo, Enrico Macerati. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane,
2003. 473-491.
—. “La ‘sovranità dell’individuo’ in Josiah Warren.” Clio 39.3 (luglio-settembre 2003): 355-373.
Dowling, Gregory. Someone’s Road Home: Questions of Home and Exile in American Narrative
Poetry. Udine: Campanotto Editore, 2003.
—. “Malinconica gaiezza. Lord Byron a Venezia.” Quaderni. Documenti sulla manutenzione
urbana di Venezia 18.6 (April 2004): 27-24.
Fabi, Maria Giulia. Afterword. Gloria Naylor. Le donne di Brewster Place. Tr. Silvia Ganbescia.
Firenze: Le lettere, 2003.
—. Introduction. Sutton E. Griggs. Imperium in imperio. Preface by Vita Fortunati. Tr. Pierpaolo
Mura. Ravenna: Longo, 2004. (Forme dell’Utopia, 13.)

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 47
Francini, Antonella. Ed. Antologia della poesia americana. Intro. Massimo Bacigalupo. Roma:
Biblioteca di Repubblica, 2004.
—. Ed. Yusef Komunyakaa. Il ritmo delle emozioni. Genova: Liberodiscrivere, 2004.
Gardini, Nicola. L’antico il nuovo lo straniero nella liricamoderna. Milano: Edizioni dell’Arco,
2000.
—. Breve storia della poesia. Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2002.
Gennaro Lerda, Valeria. Valeria Gennaro Lerda, Roberto Maccarini. Eds. Canadian and
American Women, Moving from Private to Public Experiences in the Atlantic World. Milano:
Selene, 2002. Essays from the Seminar on “Prospettive Euro-Atlantiche” organized in 2001 by
Centro Studi Euro-Atlantici.
—. “From Home-Making to Politics in the Canadian Ranching Frontier of Alberta. The Case of
Irene Marryat Parlby (1868-1965).” Rivista di Studi Canadesi/ Canadian Studies Review/ Revue
d'Etudes Canadiennes 15 (2002): 5-30.
—. “Introduction.” “Which Global Village?” Societies, Cultures, and Political -Economic Systems
in a Euro-Atlantic Perspective. Westport: Praeger, 2002. xii-xx.
—. “‘A Spirit of Adventure’: Irene Marryat Parlby (1868-1965), Reformer in Rural Alberta.”
Canadian and American Women, Moving from Private to Public Experiences in the Atlantic World.
Ed. Valeria Gennaro Lerda, Roberto Maccarini. Milano: Selene, 2002. 171-201.
Giorcelli, Cristina. Ed. Abito e Identità. Palermo: Ila Palma, 2004. (Essays by Cristina Giorcelli,
Anna Scacchi, Michela Alliata Vanon and others.)
—. “Tra costume e letteratura: i cappelli femminili negli Stati Uniti (1878-1914).” Abito e Identità.
Ed. C. Giorcelli. Palermo: Ila Palma, 2004. 105-64.
—. “Daisy Buchanan,” “Jay Gatsby,” “Gilbert Osmond,” “Isabel Archer,” “Kate Croy,”
“Serena Merle,” “Merton Densher,” “Milly Theale,” Nick Carraway,” “Paterson.” Dizionario
dei personaggi letterari. 3 Vols. Torino: UTET, 2003.
Giordano, Fedora, Enrico Comba. Eds. Indian Stories, Indian Histories. Torino: Otto Editore
2004.
Gradoli, Marina. “Un Indiano a New York” [D’Arcy McNickle]. La città multietnica nella
seconda metà del Novecento. Ed. Clara Bartocci. Napoli: ESI, 2004. 219-29.
Iurlano, Giuliana. “‘The Cause Is of God’: le donne e la riforma morale della società nell’America
jacksoniana, 1830-1840.” Per Carlo Ghisalberti. Miscellanea di studi. Ed. Ester Capuzzo, Enrico
Macerati. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2003. 473-491.
Izzo, Donatella, Giorgio Mariani. Eds. America at large. Americanistica transnazionale e nuova
comparatistica. Milano: Shake Editore, 2004. (I libri di Acoma.) With contributions by the editors,
Felice De Cusatis, and others.
Maccarini, Roberto. Valeria Gennaro Lerda, Roberto Maccarini. Eds. Canadian and American
Women, Moving from Private to Public Experiences in the Atlantic World. Milano: Selene, 2002.
Maffi, Mario. Intro. Caroline Patey. Londra. Henry James e la capitale del moderno. Milano:
Unicopli, 2004. 9-13.
—. “A Map of the Lower East Side.” Public Space, Private Lives. Race, Gender, Class and
Citizenship in New York, 1890-1929. Ed. William Boelhower, Anna Scacchi. Amsterdam: VU
University Press, 2004.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 48
—. Mississippi. Il grande fiume: un viaggio alle fonti dell’America. Milano: Rizzoli, 2004
—. New York City. An Outsider’s Inside View. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004.
—. “The Parlor and the Street: Private and Public Spaces on New York’s Lower East Side.” Public
and Private in American History. State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Raffaella
Baritono et al. Torino: Otto Editore, 2003
Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella. Ed. “Gondola Days.” Isabella Stewart Gardner e il suo mondo a Palazzo
Barbaro. Venezia: Edizioni della Laguna, 2004.
—, Alide Cagidemetrio. Eds. A Goodly Garlande in onore di Sergio Perosa. Venezia: Editoriale
Programma, 2003. (Annali di Ca’ Foscari 42.4, 2003.)
—. “Il filo d’oro nella trama: la Venezia di Ezra Pound.” Quaderni. Documenti sulla manutenzione
urbana di Venezia 18.6 (April 2004): 61-68.
Mariani, Giorgio. DonatellaIzzo, Giorgio Mariani. Eds. America at large. Americanistica
transnazionale e nuova comparatistica. Milano: Shake Editore, 2004. (I libri di Acoma.)
Molesini, Andrea. Ed. and trans. Derek Walcott. Omeros. Edizione con testo a fronte. Milano:
Adelphi, 2003.
—. Specchi & destini. Quaderno di recensioni. Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2004.
—. 39 poesie. Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2004.
—. Rev. Anne Sexton. Poesie su Dio. il manifesto, 6.12.2003.
—. Rev. Gabriella Leto. Aria alle stanze. il manifesto, 4.10.2003.
—. Rev. James McKendrick. Chiodi di cielo. il manifesto, 20.9.2003.
—. Rev. James Laughlin. Scorciatoie. il manifesto, 6.9.2003.
—. Rev. C. Tóibín. Amore in un tempo oscuro. il manifesto, 26.7.2003
—. Rev. Alfred Brendel. Un dito di troppo. il manifesto, 22.3.2003.
—. Rev. Louise Glück. L’iris selvatico. il manifesto, 8.3.2003.
—. Tr. Derek Walcott. “In Italia.” Adelphiana 3 (2004): 37-51.
Muscio, Giuliana. Piccole Italie, grandi schermi. Roma: Bulzoni, 2004.
Nasi, Franco. Ed. Roger McGough. Eclissi quotidiane. Milano: Medusa, 2004.
—. Poetiche in transito. Sisifo e le fatiche del tradurre. Milano: Medusa, 2004.
Nocera, Gigliola. Ed. Truman Capote. Il duca nel suo dominio. Intervista a Marlon Brando. Tr.
Pier Francesco Paolini. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
Nugnes, Barbara. “ ‘Signora dei silenzi’: note sull’eliotiana ‘Salutation.’” Soglie. Rivista
Quadrimestrale di Poesia e Critica Letteraria 5.2 (2003): 38-57.
Olimpo, Paola. “Sharing Responsability: Congress-Executive Relationship in the Making of
American Middle Eastern Policy, 1945-1968).” America and the Mediterranean. Ed. M.
Bacigalupo, P. Castagneto. Torino: Otto Editore, 2003. 581-590.
Ossato, Cristina. “Sartor Resartus: Re-tailoring Plato’s Myth of the Cave.” Rivista di Studi
Vittoriani 5 (1998): 89-108.
—. “Sartor Resartus, ovvero l’approssimazione del nome alla cosa.” Merope 23 (1998): 63-82.
—. “An Intertextual Reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Brahma.” Annali di Cà Foscari 38
(1999): 497-513.
—. “Women’s Education and the Flourishing of the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century America.”
Rivista di Studi Americani 10 (1999): 93-112.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 49
—. “La traduzione come segno di différance: The Ambassadors e Gli ambasciatori.” Atti del
quarto seminario di studio sulla traduzione letteraria inglese. Le traduzioni italiane di Henry
James. Ed. Sergio Perosa. Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2000. 225-44.
—. “Collecting and Creating Art: Aline Meyer Liebman.” Before Peggy Guggenheim: American
Women Art Collectors. Ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Venezia: Marsilio, 2001. 213-22.
—. “Salomé ed il linguaggio simbolico: Gustave Moreau e Oscar Wilde.” Strumenti Critici 17.3
(2002): 379-97.
—. “Thomas Carlyle’s Cosmology: Between Visual Art and Literature.” Rivista di Studi Vittoriani
7.13 (2002): 27-43.
—. Sartor Resartus, ovvero la creazione di un Nuovo Mito. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001.
Rev. Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences. Rivista di Studi Vittoriani7 (1999): 165-67.
Panaro, Cleonice. “Sui contesti di ‘emozione’ in T.S. Eliot, e le premesse di E. Pound.” Ricerca
Research Recherche 8 (2002): 95-153.
Perosa, Sergio. L'albero della cuccagna. Classici e post-coloniali di lingua inglese. Vicenza:
Accademia Olimpica, 2004. (Quaderni dell'Accademia Olimpica, 31.)
—. “Venezia, l’amata di Henry James.” Quaderni. Documenti sulla manutenzione urbana di
Venezia 18.6 (April 2004): 47-53.
Piccinato, Stefania. “Lo sguardo sulla folla: Henry James e Don DeLillo.” La città multietnica
nella seconda metà del Novecento. Ed. Clara Bartocci. Napoli: ESI, 2004. 231-46.
Pisanti, Tommaso. Ed. E. A. Poe. Il Corvo e tutte le poesie. Roma: Newton, 2003.
—. Ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. La ballata del vecchio marinaio e altre poesie. Roma: Newton,
2004.
—. “La poesia dei puritani.” Poesia 180 (2004): 45-56.
Portelli, Alessandro. Canoni americani. Oralità, letteratura, cinema, musica. Roma: Donzelli,
2004.
Proietti, Salvatore. Hippies! Le culture della controcultura. Roma: Cooper & Castelvecchi, 2003.
Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press,
2003.
Ricciardi, Caterina. “‘Don’t talk to me about Matisse’: Intertextual Duality in Michael
Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” Step Across this Line: come si interroga il testo
postcoloniale. Ed. Alessandra Contenti et al. Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2004. 57-68.
—. “Fiori cantastorie.” L’Indice 2 (2004): 12.
—. “Memoriam: il Kaddish di Anne Michaels.” Oltre la persecuzione. Donne,
ebraismo, memoria. Ed. Roberta Ascarelli. Roma: Carocci, 2004. 133-138.
—. “Mentre infuria la Guerra civile: Emily Dickinson, Sillabe di seta.” L’indice 21. 9
(settembre 2004): 22.
—. “The Secrets of Intertextuality: Alice Munro’s ‘Pictures of the Ice.’” Open Letter
11-12.9-1 (Fall 2003-Winter 2004): 121-136.
—, Valerio Massimo De Angelis. Eds. Voci dagli Stati Uniti: Prosa e poesia e teatro del secondo
Novecento. Roma: Università La Sapienza, 2004. Includes over fifty essays by Italian scholars on
contemporary American writers (Hurston and Henry Roth to Leavitt and Ellis) and Native,
Puertorican and Appalachian literature. With extensive bibliography.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 50
Rognoni, Francesco. “In un mondo di libri crollato. Attorno a ‘Visits to St. Elizabeths’ di Elizabeth
Bishop.” Nuova Corrente 131 (2003): 85-91.
Rubboli, Massimo. “Il fattore religioso nelle elezioni presidenziali degli Stati Uniti.” DIREonline
9 (2004): 1-7 [http://direonline.it/].
Russo, John Paul. “An Unacknowledged Masterpiece: Capra’s Italian American Film.” Screening
Ethnicity: Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States. Ed. Anna
Camaiti Hostert, Anthony Julian Tamburri. Boca Raton, Fl.: Bordighera Press, 2002. 291-321.
—. “Un capolavoro incompreso: il cinema italo-americano di Capra.” Scene italoamericane.
Rappresentazioni cinematografiche degli italiani d’America. Ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert, Anthony
Julian Tamburri. Roma: Luca Sossella Editore, 2002. 305-338.
—. “DeLillo: Italian American Catholic Writer.” Altreitalie 25 (2002): 4-29.
—. “The Italian in Las Vegas: from Piovene and Calvino to Colombo and Franci.” Da Ulisse a... Il
viaggio nelle terre d'oltremare. Ed. Giorgetta Revelli. Pisa: ETS, 2004. 215-231.
—. “Technology and the Mediterranean in DeLillo’s Underworld.” America and the
Mediterranean. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Pierangelo Castagneto. Torino: Otto Editore, 2003). 187-
196.
—. “Little Italy in DeLillo’s Underworld.” Culture a contatto nelle Americhe. Ed. Michele
Bottalico, Rosa Maria Grillo. Salerno: Oèdipus, 2003. 71-98.
Scacchi, Anna. “American Interiors: Redesigning the Home in Turn-of-the-Century New York.”
Public Spaces, Private Lives: Race, Class, Gender, and Citizenship in New York, 1890-
1929. Ed. William Boelhower, Anna Scacchi. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004. 15-
38.
—. “‘Born beneath a Tropic Sun’: Shades of Brown and Masculinity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
Agnes of Sorrento.” America and the Mediterranean: Proceedings of the16th AISNA
BiennialConference. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Pierangelo Castagneto. Torino: Otto, 2003.
423-33.
—. “Esuli, principesse e maragià: orientalismo e cosmopolitismo in Dark Princess di W.E.B. Du
Bois.” Letterature d’America 22.93-94 (2002): 55-94.
—. “‘Give Me the Democracy of Beauty’: lo scialle e le nuove americane.” Abito e identità, vol.
5. Ed. Cristina Giorcelli. Palermo: Ila Palma, 2004. 63-104.
—. “‘Sensitive as Any Woman’: Nineteenth-Century American Women and Mediterranean
Masculinities. Introduction.” America and the Mediterranean. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo,
Pierangelo Castagneto. Torino: Otto, 2003. 405-11.
Serrai, Roberto. Tr. Azar Nafisi. Leggere Lolita a Teheran. Milano: Adelphi, 2004. (La Collana
dei Casi, 58.)
Severi, Rita. “ ‘Astonishing in my Italian.’ Oscar Wilde a Capri.” Capri: Quaderni dell’Isola 2
(2003): 130-160.
—. Ed. Israel Zangwill. “Lachrymae Rerum a Mantova. Con una critica a D’Annunzio.”
Civiltà Mantovana 115 (2003): 130-145. (A chapter from Italian Fantasies (1910) by Israel
Zangwill.)
—. Ed. Ronald Firbank, La Principessa Zoubaroff. Palermo: Novecento, 2003.
—. “Il miracolo di Verona in ‘Madonna of the Peach Tree’di Maurice Hewlett.” Variis Linguis.
Studi offerti a Elio Mosele in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno. Supplemento a Quaderni
di Lingue e Letterature 28. Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2004. 485-500.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 51
—. “La penna e la spada: Napoleone, Byron e Mazzini. Note sul mito dell’eroe della libertà
negli scritti inglesi tra Ottocento e Novecento.” Nuova Rivista Storica 2 (maggio-agosto
2003): 363-72.
—. Review. Ronald Firbank. Letters to his Mother 1920-1924. Rivista di Letterature Moderne
e Comparate 3 (luglio-settembre 2003): 349-53.
Sioli, Marco. “La guerra di Tripoli del 1804: gli Stati Uniti, i paesi arabi e le origini del conflitto.”
http://centri.univr.it/iperstoria/interventi50.htm
Stefanelli, Maria Anita. “Anne Waldman: performance, scrittura e identità.” Donne d’America.
Studi in onore di Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli. Ed. Cristina Giorcelli. Palermo: Ila Palma, 2003.
267-79.
—. Ed. City Lights: Pocket Poets and Pocket Books. Roma: Ila Palma, 2004.
—. “Kenneth Patchen: rapsodie urbane.” Metamorfosi della città. Spazi urbani e forme di vita nella
cultura occidentale. Ed. Marinella Rocca Longo, Tiziana Morosetti. Roma: Edizioni Associate,
2003. 294-302.
—. “Kenneth Patchen,” “Robert Coover,” “David Mamet.” Voci dagli Stati Uniti. Prosa & Poesia
& Teatro del secondo Novecento. Ed. Caterina Ricciardi e Valerio Massimo De Angelis. Roma:
Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 2004. 35-44, 343-51, 555-66.
—. “Scholarship in Languages Other Than English. Italian Contributions.” American Literary
Scholarship. An Annual 2001. General Editor Gary F. Scharnhorst. Durham: Duke University Press,
2003. 483-504.
—. “Scholarship in Languages Other than English: Italian Contributions.” American Literary
Scholarship. An Annual 2002. Ed. Gary F. Scharnhorst. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Tarozzi, Bianca. “A proposito di Denise Levertov.” Ácoma – Rivista Internazionale di Studi
Nordamericani 13 (1998): 74-79.
—. ‘L’arte di perdere: Elizabeth Bishop e Margherita Guidacci.” Per Margherita Guidacci. Atti
delle Giornate di Studio. Ed. Margherita Ghilardi. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2001. 201-214.
—. “Le divinità vendicative e Margaret Atwood.” Giochi di specchi. Ed. Branko Gorjup, Francesca
Valente. Ravenna: Longo, 2000. 26-27.
—. “Due romanzi di De Lillo: il farsi e il disfarsi di un autore.” A Goodly Garlande in onore di
Sergio Perosa. Ed. A. Cagidemetrio, R. Mamoli Zorzi. Annali di Ca’ Foscari 42.4 (2003).
—. “L’eroe spiazzato in Philip Larkin, J. D. Salinger e Walker Percy.” Eroe e personaggio dal
mito alla dissoluzione novecentesca. Moncalieri: CIRVI, 1998. 279-98.
—. “Maestre e allieve.” Le parole scolpite – Profili di scrittrici degli anni Novanta. Padova: Il
Poligrafo, 1998. 279-98.
—. “Nijole Kudirka, un’artista americana.” Gli oggetti della memoria. Ed. Kudirka, B. Tarozzi.
Venezia: Catalogo della Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2002.
—. “Non a casa propria: l’esilio di Elizabeth Bishop.” Erranze, transiti, testuali,storie di
emigrazione e di esilio. Ed. Maria Teresa Chialant. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2001.
143-60.
—. Rev. “Frank O’Hara. Lunch Poems , a cura di P.F. Jacuzzi.” Poesia ’98 . Ed. Giuliano
Manacorda. Roma: Castelvetro, 1999. 221-22.
—. Rev. “Denise Levertov. Oltre la fine e altre poesie.” Poesia ’98. Ed. G. Manacorda. Roma:
Castelvetro, 1999. 220-221.
—. Rev. “Franca Bernabei: Jean Rhys e il pensiero del luogo.” Il Tolomeo 5 (1999-2000): 114-15.
—. Ed. Richard Wilbur. Contrari, ancora contrari e qualche differenza. Milano: Mondadori, 2002.
—. “Ulisse e Circe: rivisitazioni americane.” Ulisse da Omero a Pascal Quignard. Ed. Anna
Maria Babbi. Verona, 2001. 389-409.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 52
—. “La vocazione pedagogica di Henry James.” Le traduzioni Italiane di Henry James. Ed. Sergio
Perosa. Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 2000. 33-51.
Tattoni, Igina. “Biancaneve e lo Specchio.” Giochi di Specchi. Saggi sull’uso letterario
dell’immagine dello specchio. Ed. Agostino Lombardo, Roma: Bulzoni, 1999.
—. Ed. Come Coccole di Cedro. Introduzione e traduzione della prima narrativa di Walt Whitman.
Roma: Università degli Studi “La Sapienza.” 2002. Revised and enlarged ed. Roma: Donzelli,
2004.
—. Ed. and Intro. Look Homeward and Forward, Thomas Wolfe an American Voice across Modern
and Contemporary Culture. Proceedings of the Convegno Internazionale su Thomas Wolfe, Roma,
18-19 October 2001. Roma: Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 2003 .
—. “‘Su una nave l’attenzione si posa su due obiettivi: le persone e il mare.’Passage to England di
Thomas Wolfe.” Da Ulisse a … Il viaggio per mare nell’immaginario letterario e artistico, Atti
del Convegno Internazionale, Imperia 10-12 ottobre 2002. Ed. G. Revelli. Pisa: ETS, 2003.
—. “‘There was no Room for Hesitation’: The Revolution of Time in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Arthur Mervyn.” America and the Mediterranean. Ed. Massino Bacigalupo, Pierangelo Castagneto.
Torino: Otto editore, 2003.
—. Trans. Washington Irving, racconti fantastici. Roma: Donzelli, 2003.
Testi, Arnaldo. La formazione degli Stati Uniti. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.
—. Stelle e strisce. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.
Vantaggio, Valentina. “Oil and American Foreign Policy in the Middle East, 1928-1948.” America
and the Mediterranean. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Pierangelo Castagneto. Torino: Otto Editore,
2003. 591-598.
Vaudagna, Maurizio. R.Laurence Moore, Maurizio Vaudagna. Eds. The American Century in
Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Introduction (Eds.); The Concept of an American Century (Alan Brinkley).
I: DIPLOMATIC RESPONSES. The United States and Europe in an Age of American Unilateralism (Walter LaFeber);
Democracy and Power:The Interactive Nature of the American Century (Federico Romero); Europe:The Phantom Pillar
(Ronald Steel); Utopia and Realism in Woodrow Wilson 's Vision of the International Order (Massimo L.Salvadori);
The United States,Germany,and Europe in the Twentieth Century (Detlef Junker).
II: CULTURAL RESPONSES. European Elitism,American Money,and Popular Culture (Volker R.Berghahn);
American Myth,American Model,and the Quest for a British Modernity (David W.Ellwood); American Religion as
Cultural Imperialism (R.Laurence Moore); Western Alliance and Scientific Diplomacy in the Early 1960s: The Rise and
Failure of the Project to Create a European M.I.T (Giuliana Gemelli).
III: SOCIAL RESPONSES. American Democracy and the Welfare State: The Problem of Its Publics (James
T.Kloppenberg); A Checkered History:The New Deal, Democracy, and Totalitarianism in Transatlantic Welfare States
(Maurizio Vaudagna); Consuming America,Producing Gender (Mary Nolan); The Right to Have Rights: Citizens,
Aliens, and the Law in Modern America (Richard Polenberg).
Vezzosi, Elisabetta. “Cultural Ethnic Brokers.” Le Maestre Pie Filippini negli Stati Uniti. America
and the Mediterranean. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Pierangelo Castagneto. Torino: Otto Editore,
2003. 215-225.
—. “Il colore della cittadinanza. Donne nere e politiche sociali negli Stati Uniti dal 1945 ad oggi.”
Passato e Presente 20.57 (settembre-dicembre 2002): 167-187.
—. “Sciopero e rivolta. Le organizzazioni operaie negli Stati Uniti.” Storia dell’emigrazione
italiana. Arrivi. Roma: Donzelli, 2002. 271-282.
—. “Suburbi: una metafora della mistica della femminilità?” America Today. Highways and

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 53
Labyrinths. Ed. Gigliola Nocera. Siracusa: Grafià Editrice, 2003. 451-461.
—. Ed. “Tortuosi percorsi delle libertà civili negli Stati Uniti.” Contemporanea 5.4 (ottobre
2002):713-749.
Zaccaria, Paola. “Beyond one and two: the palimpsest as hieroglyph of multiplicity and relation.”
H.D.’s Poetry: “the meanings that words hide.” Ed. Marina Camboni. New York: AMS Press,
2003. 63-88.
—. Ed. Close up (192733). Antologia della prima rivista internazionale di cinema. Torino: Lindau,
2002.
—. “Introduzione.” Emily Dickinson. Poesie. Milano: Garzanti, 2002.
—. “Other Visions: Practicing Cinematic Style to Become Discoverers of the Not Known.”
America Today. Highways and Labyrinths. Ed. Gigliola Nocera. Siracusa: Grafià, 2003. 187-196.
—, P. Calefato. Fronteras de papel. Ed. Mercedes Arriaga Florez. Sevilla: Mergablum, 2002.
Membership Renewal
AISNA Members are reminded to pay their dues as soon as possible, by remitting €42 for 2003 and
€60 for 2004 to AISNA President Massimo Bacigalupo, c/o CARIGE, Piazza S. Sabina, 16124
Genova, ABI 6175, CAB 01408, CC 12332/80. You can also send a non-transferable check made
out to Gabriella Ferruggia to: Salita Superiore S. Rocchino 35/6, 16122 Genova.
For 2004, graduate students, dottorandi and assegnisti are offered a reduced membership fee of
€35, upon presentation of proof of their status to the Treasurer.
We remind you that only members in good standing will receive RSA Journal and the Proceedings
of the 2003 Ambassadors conference. Membership in AISNA includes membership in EAAS and
the possibility to participare in EAAS Conference and to receive the EAAS Newsletter.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 54
Books Received
- Ahearn, Barry. Ed. The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky.
Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2003.
- Fiamma Arditi. L'altra America.Conversazioni con diciotto grandi voci del dissenso. Roma: Fazi,
2004.
- Barnes, Djuna. Camminare nel buio. Lettere scelte a Emily Holmes Coleman (1934-1938). Trad.
Francesco Francis. Milano: Archinto, 2004.
- Blum, William. Il libro nero degli Stati Uniti. Roma: Fazi, 2003.
- Breschi, Danilo, e Gisella Longo. Camillo Pellizzi. La ricerca delle élites tra politica e sociologia
(1896-1979). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003.
- Brodskij, Iosif. Profilo di Clio. Ed. Arturo Cattaneo. Milano: Adelphi, 2003.
- Buffoni, Franco. Ed. Mario Praz vent’anni dopo. Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 2003. Essays by
Agostino Lombardo and others.
- Bukowski, Charles. Quando mi hai lasciato mi hai lasciato tre mutande. Tr. Damiano Abeni.
Roma: Minimum Fax, 2004.
- Capelli, Roberta. “Pound traduttore dei trovatori, tra esercitazione, tecnica e sperimentazione
creativa.” Romanica Vulgaria Quaderni 15 (Studi sulla traduzione 95-97, a cura di G. Tavani, C.
Pulsoni). L’Aquila, 2003. 129-186.
- Carroll, Jonathan. Il paese delle pazze risate. Tr. Luca Fusari. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
- Carson, Anne. Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: “What Thou Lovest Well...” New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 2001.
- Ceramella, Nick, Giuseppe Massara. Merica. Forme della cultura italo-americana. Isernia:
Cosmo Iannone Editore, 2004. (Quaderni sull’emigrazione, 11.)
- Chialant, Maria Teresa. Ed. Il personaggio in letteratura. Napoli: ESI, 2004. 185-93. Includes
essays on American literature by Michele Bottalico and Mario Materassi.
- Cipolloni, Marco; Levi, Guido. Eds. Fink, Guido, Intro. C’era una volta in America. Cinema,
maccartismo e guerra fredda. Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2004.
- Crisafulli, Edoardo. Storia e curiosità del “politically correct.” Firenze: Vallecchi, 2004.
- Curreli, Mario. “Immagini di Pisa nei Cantos poundiani.” Soglie 5.1 (aprile 2003): 43-48.
- d’Amico, Masolino. Persone speciali. Roma: Aragno, 2003.
- De Kooning, William. Appunti sull’arte. Ed. Alessandra Salvini. Milano: Abscondita, 2003.
- Dickinson, Emily. Poesie. Ed. Margherita Guidacci. Intr. Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti. Milano:
Corriere della Sera, 2004.
- DiFranco, Ani. Self-evident. Poesie e disegni. Ed. Martina Testa. Roma: Minumum Fax, 2004.
- Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. Tr. Alessandra Scalero. Intr. Piero Gelli. Milano: Baldini
& Castoldi, 2002.
- Farabbi, Anna Maria. Le alfabetiche cromie di Kate Chopin. Perugia: Lietocollelibri, 2003. See
.
- Farnararo, Sante. Rassegna bibliografica della letteratura critica sulla Science Fiction
statunitense 1970-2003. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2003. pp. 140. ISBN 88-495-0756-9.
- Faulkner, William. Opere scelte. Vol. II. Ed. Fernanda Pivano. Bibliography by Erminio Corti.
Milano: Mondadori, 2004. Includes Gli invitti, Go Down, Moses, Non si fruga nella polvere,
Requiem per una monaca.
- Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. How to Paint Sunlight: New Poems. New York: New Directions, 2001.
- Fiedler, Leslie A. Vacanze romane. Un critico a spasso nell’Italia letteraria. Ed. Samuele F. S.
Pardini. Roma: Donzelli, 2004.
- Fletcher, Angus. A New Thory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment and the Future
of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004.
- Freudenberger, Nell. Ragazze fortunate. Tr. Chiara Spallino Rocca. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 55
- Ginzberg, Louis. Le leggende degli ebrei. IV. Mosè in Egitto, Mosè nel deserto. Ed. Elena
Loewenthal. Milano: Adelphi, 2003.
- Giorello, Giulio. Prometeo, Ulisse, Gilgameš. Figure del mito. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2004.
(On Ezra Pound and James Joyce.)
- Grespi, Barbara. Howard Hawks. Recco: Le mani, 2004.
- Hertsgaard, Mark. L’ombra dell’aquila. Perché gli Stati Uniti sono così amati e odiati. Tr. Fabio
Paracchini e Francesca Mazzantini. Milano: Garzanti, 2002.
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Venti giorni con Julian. Con un saggio di Paul Auster. Tr. Paolo
Dilonardo. Milano: Adelphi, 2004. (Piccola Biblioteca, 518.)
- Hesse, Eva. Marianne Moore. Dichterin der Moderne. Aachen: Rimbaud, 2002.
- Heyen, William. Ed. September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Silver Springs MD:
Etruscan Press, 2002.
- Hillman, James. Il sogno e il mondo infero. Tr. Adriana Bottini. Milano: Adelphi, 2003.
- Hooper, Chloe. Cronaca nera per bambini. Trad. Sara Caraffini. Milano: Garzanti, 2004.
- Kerouac, Jack. I capolavori di Jack Kerouac. Intr. Fernanda Pivano. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
- Koch, Kenneth. A Possible World: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2002.
- Leithauser, Brad. Darlington’s Fall: A Novel in Verse. New York: Knopf, 2003.
- Lodato, Nuccio. Howard Hawks. Milano: Castoro Cinema, 2003.
- Lombroso, Cesare, Guglielmo Ferrero. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman.
Translated and with a new introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004.
- McClatchy, J.D. Hazmat: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2002.
- McClatchy, J.D. Ed. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Vintage,
2003.
- MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Come vola il corvo. Tr. Giovanna Granato. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
- Materassi, Mario. Faulkner, ancora. Bari: Palomar, 2004.
- Menand, Louis. Il Circolo metafisico. La nascita del pragmatismo in America. Trad. Valeria
Pazzi, Roberta Zuppet. Milano: Sansoni-RSC, 2004.
- Montale, Eugenio. Posthumous Diary. Ed. Jonathan Galassi. New York: Turtle Point, 2001.
- Nicholson, Mervyn. 13 Ways of Looking at Images: The Logic of Visualization in Literature and
Society. Berverly Hills: Red Heifer Press, 2003.
- Nye, Naomi Shibab. Words Under Words: Selected Poems. Portland: Eight Mountain Press, 1995.
- Olds, Sharon. Satana dice. Ed. Elis Biagini. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2002.
- Olsen, Tillie. Fammi un indovinello. Tr. Giovanna Scocchera. Varese: Giano, 2004.
- Pivano, Fernanda. The beat goes on. Ed. Guido Harari. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
- Plath, Sylvia. I capolavori. Con un saggio di Joyce Carol Oates. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
- Pound, Ezra. Pisaner Cantos. Ed. Eva Hesse. Zurich: Arche, 2002.
- Pound, Ezra. The Pisan Cantos. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: New Directions, 2003.
- Pound, Ezra. Poems and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: Library of America,
2003.
- Quian, Zhaoming. Ed. Ezra Pound and China. Ann Arbor: Michigan, 2003.
- Rigoni, Mario Andrea. Elogio dell’America. Roma: Liberal, 2003.
- Rizzardi, Alfredo “Il Pound Symposium di nuova corrente,” Nuova Corrente 131 (2003): 73-77.
- Rosenblatt, Joe. Delirio di pappagallo. Favola surrealista. Ed. Alfredo Rizzardi. Collages by
Michel Christensen, Bari: Schena, 2003.
- Salter, Mary Jo. Open Shutters: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2003.
- Sanavio, Piero. Ezra Pound. Bellum perenne. Rimini: Raffaelli Editore, 2002.
- Savage, Thomas. La regina delle greggi. Trad. Stefano Beretta, Milano: Ponte alle Grazie, 2004.
- Schwartz, Delmore. Il mondo è un matrimonio. Tr. Attilio Veraldi. Varese: Giano, 2003.
- Scurati, Antonio. Televisioni di guerra. Il conflitto del Golfo come evento mediatico e il paradosso
dello spettatore totale. Verona: ombre corte, 2003.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 56
- Shapiro, Karl. Selected Poems. Ed. John Updike. New York: Library of America, 2004.
- Shapiro, Karl. Creative Glut: Selected Essays. Ed. Robert Phillips. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.
- Steinbeck, Thomas. Sul fondo di un mare senza suono. Tr. Norman Gobetti. Varese: Giano, 2004.
- Steinberg, Saul. Lettere a Aldo Buzzi 1945-1999. Ed. Aldo Buzzi. Milano: Adelphi, 2002.
- Stella, Maria. “Collezioni e racconto in Stein, Woolf e Sackville West.” I consumi. Una questione
di genere. Ed. Mangiolina Arru, Maria Stella. Roma: Carocci, 2003. 145-154.
- Strand, Mark, Damiano Abeni. Eds. West of your cities. Nuova antologia della poesia americana.
Roma: Minumum Fax, 2003.
- Tyler, Anne. Un matrimonio da dilettanti. Tr. Laura Pignatti. Milano: Guanda, 2004.
- Vallone, Mirella. “Quella rara intensità.” Henry James tra narrativa e teatro. Pescara: Edizioni
Campus, 2003. (Finnegans, 13.)
- Vanderbes, Jennifer. Un giorno saprai. Tr. Katia Bagnoli. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
- Verdino, Stefano. Racconto della poesia. Il Novecento europeo. Genova: De Ferrari, 2003.
Includes chapters on Pound and Eliot.
- Wallace, Emily Mitchell. Ed. Paideuma 31.1-2-3 (2002). Special Volume Dedicated to James
Laughlin 1914-1997.
- Wescott, Glenway. Appartamento ad Atene. Trad. Giulia Arborio Mella. Milano: Adelphi, 2003.
- Yao, Steven G. Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 57
In Memoriam
Raffaele Cocchi
Franco Minganti writes:
BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me
Emily Dickinson
a French car
screeching in my ear how real it was!
Behind the wheel Death, a big sloppy faggot;
He opened the door I had to get in!
Gregory Corso
Sul sito di Lele http://www.raffaele.cocchi.name/ – una piccola scritta indica “last update:
22/03/2004 19:15.” Quarantotto ore più tardi quel “last“ avrebbe davvero indicato l’ultimo suo
intervento su quella parte di sé e della sua anima profonda che era quella porzione di spazio virtuale
in cui andava raccogliendo tracce e itinerari – reali, immaginati, sognati – del suo lavoro e della sua
vita: un incessante work in progress di faticosa manutenzione del sapere e della vita, una pratica
animata da un profondo senso etico delle cose.
Non ci sono remore nell’indicare l’indirizzo del sito: Lele credeva fortemente nella funzione di
servizio del suo lavoro, nella pubblica utilità per una comunità antropologicamente culturale, e
andava giustamente orgoglioso del numero di contatti – per lo più dall’estero – che le sue pagine
internet salutavano.
Lele mancherà a molti, anche a parecchi che con avrebbero minimamente sospettato che la sua
presenza facesse del nostro ambiente e dei nostri ambiti di lavoro luoghi a maggiore garanzia di
civile convivenza.
Parafrasando certe parole affettuose che aveva dedicato a Gregory Corso in un saggio uscito alla
scomparsa del poeta, sia dunque lunga vita alle sue tracce terrene.
Pedro Pietri
Pedro Pietri, il più celebre dei poeti nuyorican (portoricani di New York), è morto nella notte di
martedì 2 marzo 2004, mentre veniva riportato in aereo a New York da Tijuana (Messico), dove, in
una clinica specializzata, era stato curato per un tumore allo stomaco: una serie di gravi emorragie
interne l’ha indebolito e infine ucciso. Pedro Pietri era ormai una figura nota della scena letteraria
statunitense: autore del famoso, crudo e struggente “Puerto Rican Obituary,” che aveva inaugurato
la stagione della nuyorican poetry, e di numerose altre composizioni poetiche in una vena sempre
più surreale e onirica (la serie di “cabine telefoniche”); apprezzato scrittore di teatro, più volte
messo in scena off e off-off Broadway negli Stati Uniti e in altri paesi; presente nelle più importanti
antologie di letteratura americana; una voce autorevole e fortemente critica, che sapeva unire
sperimentalismo e tradizione orale, in performances indimenticabili per presenza scenica, capacità
di coinvolgere il pubblico, rabbia e ironia – autentici, indimenticabili one-man shows. Sempre

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 58
vestito di nero, una contagiosa risata sempre pronta, una voce plastica e una contagiosa simpatia,
una valigetta traboccante di opuscoli autoprodotti, era conosciuto anche in Italia, per le sue letture
in occasione di numerosi incontri e festival di poesia (a Venezia, Milano, Torino, Roma, Cagliari,
Nuoro) e per le due antologie Scarafaggi metropolitani e altre poesie (Baldini & Castoldi, Milano
1993) e Out of Order/Fuori servizio (CUEC, Cagliari 2000). Era anche un carissimo amico, che mi
mancherà molto.
Mario Maffi
do not let
artificial lamps
make strange shadows
out of you
do not dream
if you want your dreams
to come true
you knew how to sing
before you was
issued a birth certificate
turn off the stereo
this country gave you
it is out of order
your breath
is your promiseland
if you want
to feel very rich
look at your hands
that is where
the definition of magic
is located at
Pedro Pietri, “Love Poem for My People”
Monthly Review Press (1973), 78
Maria Stella
We regret to report that Maria Stella, professor of English at Roma I, and a sensitive scholar and
translator, died on 3 March 2004. One of her recent publications is listed above under Books
Received.
Alfredo Rizzardi
We are saddened by the news that Alfredo Rizzardi, who was AISNA President in 1981-1983, died
in Pisa on 19 July. Alfredo was a distinguished presence in American and Canadian studies and will
be remembered for his essays, his translations, and his generosity to young scholars. It is a fitting
homage that his pioneering translation of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos was reprinted in the first week
of September for the poetry series of Corriere della Sera.
A questo punto sento sorgere in me una domanda: a che cosa è servito tutto questo? Ma invece di lasciarmi prendere dal
pessimismo, mi viene in mente una frase che adoperavo quando avevo vent’anni per respingere il senso di vanitas
vanitatum e di inutilità che mi coglieva quando mi accorgevo che l’unico vero interesse delle mie giornate era la poesia:
“Tra cinquant’anni anche i tranvieri useranno il linguaggio di Ungaretti.“ A volte oggi mi capita di parlare con dei
giovani autisti di autobus e di meravigliarmi della scioltezza e dell’efficacia del loro linguaggio.
Alfredo Rizzardi, “Il Pound Symposium di nuova corrente,” Nuova Corrente 131 (2003): 76-77.

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 59
Meanwhile
Genova is Cultural Capital of Europe for 2004. Among many events connected with the U.S.A.
there was a reading by Italian American poets, “Scoprendo la Merica,” with Sandra M. Gilbert,
Maria Mazziotti Gillam, George Guida and Robert Viscusi (Festival Internazionale di Poesia,
Palazzo Ducale, 28 June 2004). Lou Reed read the same day at 9 PM. When you visit, don’t miss a
newly recovered fresco by Bernardo Strozzi at Palazzo Lomellino in Via Garibaldi, 7 (until 31
December), showing “Faith landing in—America.”
An American friend, Alexander C. Sanger, Chair of International Planned Parenthood Federation,
sent the Editors the following resumé of his impressions of Genoa when touring it recently under
the aegis of the Wolfsonian Foundation (Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., Chairman) and the Bogliasco
Foundation. We would like to share this “Ode” with AISNA Members, and encourage them to visit
Alexander Sanger’s instructive website (www.AlexanderSanger.com).
Ode to Genova
I’m sure that Genoa is quite entertaining
On the one day a year it isn’t raining.
The itinerary was flexible—one can’t be picky
When your indomitable guides are Jane and Micky.
When visiting treacherous mountain castellos
The ladies were forced to abandon their monolos.
Interrupting mass for the Flemish triptych—what a fiasco
Though quickly redeemed by dinner at Bogliasco.
Our group was an especially friendly bunch
More so after a three hour lunch.
We passed our days in ristorantes and trattorias
With intermezzos only for cafes and gelaterias.
The meals were baroque, at times rococo
My stomach is having its Risorgimento.
After a week of seafood my fondest wish
Is never to see another fish.
The wines were superb, the portions gluttonian

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 60
I’m donating my liver to Micky’s Wolfsonian.
So just give me pesto and semi-freddo
And I’ll be ready for my tomb in Staglieno.
We love Genoa in all its Gloria
So grazie to Roberta, Glenn, Jane, Mickey and Andrea Doria.
Alexander Sanger, Genoa, 1-8 May, 2004
A Note on English and American History
British history – dating from 1707 – is not much older than American history, dating from 1776.
Even English history is not that much older, if we consider the beginning of America to be the
early seventeenth-century settlements. English history begins in the second half of the sixteenth
century, following the Henrician Reformation. Before that, England’s history is merged with
Continental developments, from which it is quite artificial and misleading to separate it. . . . It is
English historians, oddly enough particularly of the medieval variety, who are most prone to fits of
English nationalism in their reading of their country’s history.
—Krishan Kumar, Department of Sociology, University of Virginia (Times Literary Supplement,
Letters, 13 February 2004, p. 17)
The north-south streets are named for poets—
Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Lowell—
so it’s no surprise that this tiny village
is fading to gray, mildewed and dusty,
shelved at the back of the busy library
of American progress. On this winter day
all that's left of Whittier's “Snowbound”
whispers in under the nailed-shut door
of a house at the edge of a cornfield,
and slides across a red vinyl car seat
wedged in a broken tree. All but a few
stubborn families have packed up and left,
seeking a better life, following Evangeline,
leaving this island with its cars up on blocks,
its gardens of broken washing machines,
its empty rabbit hutches nailed to sheds,
cold and alone on the sea of the prairie,
to be pounded and pounded forever
by time and these whitecaps of snow.
Garrison, Nebraska
—Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2005
The Hudson Review, 55th Anniversary Year (Winter 2004)

AISNA Newsletter 54-55, p. 61
AISNA
Associazione Italiana Studi Nord Americani
Italian Association for North American Studies
www.aisna.org
Board 2001-2004
President
Massimo Bacigalupo, Facoltà di Lingue e letterature straniere, Università di Genova, Piazza
S.Sabina, 2, 16124 Genova, 37237[at]unige.it, tel. 010-2099555, fax 010-2465890
Vice Presidents
Raffaella Baritono, Dipartimento di Politica, Università di Bologna, Strada Maggiore, 45, 40125
Bologna, baritono[at]spbo.unibo.it
Caterina Ricciardi, Dipartimento Studi Americani, Università di Roma 3, Via Ostiense 236, 00146
Roma, ricciard[at]uniroma3.it
Treasurer
Gabriella Ferruggia, Università di Genova, DISCLIC, Piazza S.Sabina, 2, 16124 Genova,
gabriella.ferruggia[at]unige.it
Secretary
Stefano Rosso, Anglistica, Università di Bergamo, Via Salvecchio, 19, 24129 Bergamo,
stefano.rosso[at]unibg.it
Board Members
Gianfranca Balestra, Dipartimento di Filologia e Critica della Letteratura, Facoltà di Lettere e
Filosofia, Università di Siena, Via Roma 47, 53100 SIENA, balestra[at]unisi.it
Mario Maffi, Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio e Letterature Straniere Comparate,
Università di Milano, Piazza S.Alessan dro 1, 20123 Milano, mario.maffi[at]unimi.it
Igina Tattoni, Università di Roma “La Sapienza,“ igina.tattoni[at]uniroma1.it
Elisabetta Vezzosi, Dipartimento di Storia e Storia dell’Arte, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia,
Università di Trieste, vezzosi[at]univ.trieste.it
Representative on EAAS Board
Tiziano Bonazzi, Dipartimento di Politica, Università di Bologna, Strada Maggiore, 45, 40125
Bologna, bonazzit[at]spbo.unibo.it