Chapter 12 - White Immigrant Trajectories in US Urban Literature

Summary

This chapter explores the trajectory of American urban ethnic literature, focusing on Italian American fiction –– after brief consideration of Jewish American fiction –– as selected writers make their journey from immigrants to ethnics. Unlike the few Italian immigrant writers who preceded them, whose work argued for acceptance as human beings and recognition as Americans, the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants documented and explored the conditions under which they were born and raised. We see over the years in the shift from earlier Italian-American writers’ origin narratives featuring struggles with the host culture, alienation from the ancestral culture, and the price of integration, to the inward turn of later writers whose work mark the passage of the literary city from realist to modernist narrative. That inward turn toward loss in later generationsis not merely formal; it measures the distance between a vibrant ethnic urban world commonly founded on regional identities (often called campanilismo) to the shards of memory, the ancestral ghosts that survive in recreatedidentities, and poses the aesthetic and existential question of what to make of it.