SON OF ITALY
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LEGENDA
YELLOW
HIGHLIGHT: REQUIRED
BLUE HIGHLIGHT: STRONGLY RECOMMENDED BUT NOT REQUIRED |
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ASSIGNMENT 4 FEB 11 1) Screen the shorts The Black Hand and The Skyscrapers of New York 2) READ: Son of Italy pages 1 - 44. 3) STUDY GUIDES -- These are old quizzes from previous classes. They can provide a useful guide for your readings and screenings. Some of these documents are not fully formatted, but the content is correct. Cartoons New Orleans Shorts Son of Italy BLOG REQUIRED |
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STUDY
GUIDE: in the future I will assign TAKING NOTES as part of your
REQUIRED
work SON OF ITALY EXAMPLE OF NOTE TAKING (for an even better example of note-taking CLICK HERE)
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| QUOTATION.
"I had faith in myself. Without realizing it, I had learned the greatest lesson of America: I had learned to have faith in the future. No matter how bad things were, a turn would inevitably come- as long as I did not give up. I was sure of it. But how much I had to suffer until change came! What a thorny heartbreaking road it was!" |
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OBSERVATIONS Early immigrants from Italy did not think they were immigrating.They thought they were going to work to a very far away place, make some money and return home. Their goal was always to return. The fear was that something would prevent them from returning. Then, they realized that, in most cases, only those who failed were going back. They found themselves trapped. Not enough success to return home and live off their earnings. Nor did they have a “dream,” the so-called American Dream. They were running away from a nightmare and that was enough for them. Many of them found another nightmare, a nightmare they were not prepared for. In addition to the same torments of physical exhaustion, exploitation and often poverty, they discovered alienation and the trauma of being away from anything familiar. These were not people who traveled much in their first lives. They became heartbroken, depressed, despondent. Pascal seems to be saying that, in the best of cases, being an immigrant was some kind of purgatory. If you passed the tribulations, if you endured, if you were willing to give up your native identity and go through the process of assimilation, you would become an American. And if you wanted to survive, prosper, there was no other way but to become American. You cannot live in two places, in America in your daily life and in Italy in your heart and soul. If you do so, you go mad. Pascal identity switch is represented by the switch of linguistic code., Language is a fundamental dimension of identity. Going from Italian to English means that his soul has undergone a metamorphosis. His artistic temperament exists in the English dimension, for an English audience. He has learned how to talk to them because he has become one of them. But, he does not consider that a success.
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