Search results for " Italian American"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
“Hyperethnicity” and Ethnic Scenarios in White Noise by Don DeLillo
2021
The present article aims at analyzing the reshaping of the Italian American cultural heritage in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Drawing on the concept of hyperreality as construed by Jean Baudrillard, the notion of hyperethnicity proves to be an efficient tool for a thorough exam of the transformation of the crucial Italian American topoi — i.e, ethnic signifiers such as the conception of the family, the theme of the household, and the concept of serietà — in the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. Analyzing the signs of italianità in novels by Don DeLillo, Fred Gardaphé hypothesizes that the writer enacts a “masquerade” of his cultural identity, encoding in this manner ethnic “traces” into his o…
Giuseppina Terranova and Other Gruesome Stories: Cases of Female Italian-American murderers in the press from the 1890s to the 1910s
2019
Immigrant women during the period of mass migration received little public attention. However, when some of them became protagonists in sensational murder cases, they burst into the public sphere. Analyzing the representation of Josephine Terranova and other female Italian-American murderers in both the yellow press and the Italian-American press shows how some of these invisible women were able to assert themselves in the public sphere and achieve a degree of agency despite their tragic circumstances. These women, represented as degenerate and genetically inferior in the early coverage of their cases and trials, were, over time, essentially rehabilitated in the press as “proper” American s…
“Curious Victories”: The Famous Murder Case of Maria Barbella and Italian-American Women in the Press Between the 1890s and 1910s
2019
Immigrant women during the period of mass migration received little public attention. However, when some of them became protagonists in sensational murder cases, they burst into the public sphere. Analyzing the representation of Maria Barbella's trial in the mainstream, yellow and the Italian-American press shows how some of these invisible women were able to assert themselves in the public sphere and achieve a degree of agency despite their tragic circumstances. These women, represented as degenerate and genetically inferior in the early coverage of their cases and trials, were, over time, essentially rehabilitated in the press as “proper” American subjects as a result of the convergence o…