Italian American Literature and Film 
              
   SPRING 2017

Prof. Fabio Girelli-Carasi

LECTURE 5
FILENAME:  last-name.march13

Email subject: assignment March 13
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ALL TASKS IN ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT

task 1:  Copy the following statement: "Late assignments and / or assignments that do not meet format requirements will not be graded."

task 2    TAKE NOTES OF     THE ITALIAN

 
task 3    SCREEN  the lecture on THE ITALIAN     TAKE NOTES

 

 
 task 3    SCREEN   L'EMIGRANTE    TELEGRAPHIC NOTES (this is not the kind of text that demands "deep connecting.")

 

Answer briefly:   did you see the anti-capitalist and anti-American message in the film? Did you notice the roles of African Americans (very small) in this movie? How are white Americans represented? Isn't this a critical view of American society?
TASK 4:   THE ITALIAN   AT LEAST HALF A PAGE.

What is the scene that touched you the deepest in the book?
Again, try to identify the FIRST reactions, and then the wider considerations that they brought about.

Ex: the death of his workmates. Horror and pity first, and then maybe the question "Was it worth it FOR THEM?"  "Was it worth it for all of those who did not make it?"  "Was building a new nation worth all the pain and blood?" Sure, for those who survive and succeed it almost always is. But for the other ones? (Same question applies to wars, for instance.)
TASK 5:   THE ITALIAN  OPTIONAL: FOR EXTRA CREDIT (counts as a full assignment, with a separate grade.)

A SOLID PAGE

Language and Identity:   Pascal cannot write in Italian because his Italian is poor, but also because he is no longer Italian: his Italian identity vanished (slowly) as he learned the new language. Moreover, ONLY in this new language can he TALK about his concrete experiences but MORE IMPORTANT, about his inner world, the world of the emotions that the American experiences triggered.

This is not an easy task. It requires some serious thinking about language and identity. You can find millions of papers, documents, essays etc. online that touch on this enormously complex topic: from anthropology to zoology and every discipline in between in alphabetical order, Language and Identity is one of the fundamental themes of human experience and speculation.