(DOWNLOAD) "An Apology for Lesbian Visibility in Italian Literary Criticism (Notes and Discussions) (Critical Essay)" by Italica # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: An Apology for Lesbian Visibility in Italian Literary Criticism (Notes and Discussions) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Italica
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 114 KB
Description
In an essay published a few years ago in Italica, Remo Ceserani cautions Italian scholars against a direct importation of Cultural Studies as currently practiced in the U.S. academy into the Italian university, and more broadly, into the international field of Italian Studies. For Ceserani, the version of Cultural Studies that is crossing Italian Studies' borders is too tied to a U.S.-specific socio-historical and economic context, and is consequentially trendy and market-driven. The forces of supply and demand which drive the U.S. university curriculum and political issues around multi-culturalism have resulted, for him, in a fragmentation of disciplinary emphasis and a narrowing of disciplinary focus: "non piu quindi e soltanto la cultura delle classi subalterne o popolari, ma tutte le culture di minoranza e marginalita, specialmente quelle su base sessuale (le donne, i gay, ecc.) o su base etnica" (233). (1) His respondent Barbara Spackman notes, in the subsequent issue of Italica, that centrally located in Ceserani's discourse is the anxiety of literature's role in the humanities, the very anxiety that has in part propelled the growth of Cultural Studies in the U.S., according to Ceserani. Yet perhaps more compelling is the underlying anxiety in Ceserani's comments of an unstoppable globalization process, which at its most innocuous might be homogenizing, and at worst is experienced as cultural and linguistic erasure. In this process, U.S. academic imperialism, an economic arm of the U.S. as would-be sole super power, will swallow Italy whole. Thus cultural studies, or studi culturali, as Ceserani says, is "un fenomeno di moda," a fashion trend, "che si e diffuso partendo dagli Stati Uniti anche grazie ai meccanisimi dell'industria culturale globalizzata" (232). Dismissing perhaps too lightly Ceserani's concern about the underlying homogenizing mechanisms at play, Barbara Spackman begins her response to Remo Ceserani with Edward Said's lesson that "theory travels ... and where there is travel, there is an economy of loss and gain" (398). Spackman then goes on to re-situate the entry of Cultural Studies in the U.S., noting that African-American and Women's Studies pre-date Cultural Studies in the American academy, and to break down the rigid borders around nations and disciplines.