Forlilpsi

According to Barbara Welter, religion or piety was at the heart of a "true" woman's cardinal attributes. This "peculiar susceptibility" to religion, reportedly bestowed upon women by God Himself, blessed them with an intrinsic virtuosity and, in so doing, appointed them as the bastions of morality within the domestic realm. This emphasis on religion stemmed from the revivalist movement that spread throughout the Unites States in the antebellum decades. The movement, known as the Second Great Awakening, was particularly successful at converting women, and at involving them in pastoral activities, including preaching. In this way, it laid the groundwork for the creation of a culture of female piety that unlocked the production of a literature infused with theology. In that respect, one the most popular writers of the era was Susan Warner, the author of The Wide, Wide World. The novel, published in 1850, stands out in the genre for the magnitude and scope of the...

In a 1986 interview, the comic artist Art Spiegelman confessed to having made an initial decision counter to his Pulitzer-winning graphic memoir  Maus  being postmodern… and yet, it turned out to be one of the most controversial  – and convincing – examples of postmodernist rethinking of historical writing.  The working hypothesis discussed in the present essay is the ‘inevitability’ of the text’s postmodernist structure, due to two main factors: firstly, the author’s second-generation perspective, which prevented the mimetic representation of a reality “beyond his darkest dreams”. Accordingly, Spiegelman chose to portray the various nationalities involved in the conflict with an animal mask, modeled on the American mainstream funny-animal comic heroes. This resulted in a hybrid form, originated in a conflation of highbrow and lowbrow art, which is considered typical of the postmodernist literary production. Secondly, the peculiar narrative matter at the heart of the project – an or...

This essay focuses on “hunger”, the Leitmotif of Anzia Yezierska's literary production, a powerful mixture of feelings experienced by her protagonists, Jewish women born and raised in the poverty and oppression of the shtetlach under the Czarist domination, who fled to America in the 1880s to look for opportunities of freedom, spiritual development and personal growth that they believed they could find only in the New World. Sadly, their longing turns out to be a metaphysical one that can never be satisfied, which consigns them to a destiny of messianic wait and unfulfilled desire where hunger remains the only possible existential dimension, i.e. their one story.

The present essay focuses on a case of matricide which happened in New Jersey in 1812. Mary and Cornelius Cole, a married couple, were charged with the murder of Mary’s mother, Agnes Thuers. While Cornelius denied any involvement in the actual killing, and only admitted to assisting his wife in concealing the crime and disposing of the body, Mary confessed but claimed that she had killed Thuers in self-defence. She was convicted and hanged for this crime whereas her husband was sentenced to two years in prison as an accessory. The case was swiftly turned into two criminal narratives: A Genuine Sketch of the Trial of Mary Cole for the Wilful Murder of her Mother, Agnes Thuers (1812) and The Confession of Mary Cole (1813). The essay demonstrates how the strategies and techniques employed to construct, fictionalize, and present the tormented mother-daughter relationship to the reading public, offer a privileged insight into the dominant familial and gender ideologies of the time.

The present essay focuses on a new phase in the evolution of Jewish-American writing which characterized the late 1960s and the 1970s, an era in which the then-current secular, humanist outlook was gradually abandoned in favor of an engagement with particularistic aspects of Judaism, above all religious issues. As I argue, Cynthia Ozick played a leading role as a theorizer and spokesperson of this literary phenomenon. In a series of insightful essays published in the early 1970s, above all the programmatic piece "Towards a New Yiddish," she, in fact, appealed to her fellow Jewish writers for a literary production engaging with distinctly Jewish theological paradigms and categories. Such a "tribal," self-referential perspective was, in her view, a necessary measure to ensure the survival of the Jewish tradition in the United States, a tradition which had been constantly threatened by the pressures of secularism. Her reflections marked the beginnings of what later ...

Jonathan Franzen's production is characterized by a body of non-fiction writing that has greatly contributed to the heated debate about the declining relevance of the novel in contemporary America. In his controversial essay "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels," published in 1996, Franzen acknowledged the diminished cultural role of highbrow novels in a nation dominated by consumerism, mass culture, new media and instant entertainment. In this light, the author made a public call for ambitious fiction to rise to the challenges of the late twentieth century. Interestingly, Franzen equated such novels with the "tragic" mode: by "tragic" he meant "just about any fiction that raises more questions than it answers: anything in which conflict doesn't resolve into cant." Much of Franzen's fiction participates in the same discourse that is developed in his essayistic production, especially his early work, wh...

Il presente saggio è incentrato sul cosiddetto 'terzo atto' della letteratura ebraico-americana avviatosi negli anni Ottanta del Novecento. Si tratta di una fase che ha visto un rinnovato interesse per la teologia, specialmente per il rapporto tra la tradizione e le sfide sempre più pressanti della modernità, le quali hanno imposto un processo di secolarizzazione indubbiamente pericoloso per la continuità del 'popolo eletto.' Una fra le voci di spicco è Allegra Goodman, scrittrice ebrea di terza generazione, particolarmente attenta al presente e al futuro delle comunità ebraiche nella diaspora, specialmente a quanto ella percepisce come il profondo anelito dei suoi contemporanei a un comune denominatore spirituale che conferisca senso e scopo a esistenze altrimenti immerse nel mare magnum culturale dell'America contemporanea. Nell'opus di Goodman, il tentativo di recupero della tradizione s'incentra sovente sulla Shoah, innalzata a mito di fondazione dell...