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436 Annali d’italianistica 30 (2012)
terrorist” (120), that is its essential concern. Gargiulo’s sweeping essay spans
from the origins of the bourgeoisie to its blurring with the proletariat into a “low
cost” class of equalized desires and consumptions in the new media-centered
universe represented in Italy by Berlusconi’s TV empire. At its core lies a
pointed analysis of the ideology of the Red Brigades as it emerges from the
memoirs of those involved in the Moro kidnapping as well as from Marco
Bellocchio’s film Buongiorno notte (2003), based on one such account. For
Gargiulo, the rigid dogmatism of leaders of the Red Brigades, such as Mario
Moretti, demonstrates their total disconnection from the “working masses” in
whose name they supposedly acted, and of which they only had a hagiographic
and entirely misguided picture.
With the final two essays we come to the threshold of the twenty-first
century. For Nicoletta Di Ciolla, the noir fiction of Gianni Farinetti, and in
particular his first novel, Un delitto fatto in casa (1996), paints a broad picture
of an Italian (and, specifically, Turinese) upper bourgeois family in order to lay
bare the hypocrisy and hollowness that governs both its private and public
actions. The death of the patriarch — the symbolic incarnation of the law —
makes it possible for his “subjects” to validate and follow “alternative and more
authentic patterns” (164) in their personal and social life. Francesca
Mazzucato’s novel Hot Line: Storia di un’ossessione, also published in 1996
and the topic of Stefania Lucamante’s essay that closes the volume, shows on
the contrary the resilience of the conservative codes of behavior of the
bourgeoisie, and especially of their public performance. The contradictory
father-daughter relationship staged by Mazzucati is the story of a failed
transgression, as the protagonist remains in thrall of the bourgeois values
internalized in childhood.
The only flaw of the volume is that Farleigh Dickinson University Press
seems to have spent little time on copy-editing the text. Otherwise, these essays,
all characterized by theoretical rigor and fine textual analyses, are exemplary of
the kind of contribution that an interdisciplinary approach — cutting across film,
literary and cultural studies — can make to the renewal of Italian Studies.
Luca Somigli, University of Toronto
Martino Marazzi. Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian
American Literature with a Critical Anthology. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 343.
Il pregevole volume di Martino Marazzi, professore di letteratura italiana presso
l’Università degli Studi di Milano, viene pubblicato in traduzione inglese dopo
avere visto la luce in italiano nel 2001. Nella nuova edizione, inclusa nel
catalogo della Fordham University Press, sono state inserite alcune parti e