Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ruvoli, JoAnne

Titel

Metaphors, Mamma, and Meatballs: Personal Storytelling in the Criticism of Italian American Literature

Ist Teil von

• Melus, 2018-02, Vol.43 (1), p.134-158

Ort / Verlag

Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• I analyze the role that personal storytelling has played in the criticism of Italian American texts to call together a community of critics and to authenticate the role of localized and "unauthorized" knowledge in the study of literature. Focusing on Marianne De Marco Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter (1994) and Fred Gardaphé's From Wise Guys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (2006), as well as several shorter critical essays, I apply theories of narrative inquiry to show that personal storytelling is used as a method, a mode, and a metaphor in literary criticism to politicize the study of texts that have for the most part existed in the margins of canonical American literature. I claim that personal narrative establishes the credibility of the critic in still-emerging fields such as Italian American literature and documents the ethnic vernacular as well as the struggles and resistance that the critics encounter in trying to research the marginalized literature. The use of personal stories in literary criticism subverts the long-standing fallacy of the disinterested critic and directly challenges established academic values and critical standards, as well as established notions of literary criticism.