Ethnic Passages

Ethnic Passages PDF Author: Thomas J. Ferraro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226244419
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Farraro (English, Duke U.) defends immigration narratives from their reputation of having stereotyped characters and plots. He argues that they are manifestations of a rebirth paradigm and draw on all the literary tools employed by other genres. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ethnic Passages

Ethnic Passages PDF Author: Thomas J. Ferraro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226244419
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
Farraro (English, Duke U.) defends immigration narratives from their reputation of having stereotyped characters and plots. He argues that they are manifestations of a rebirth paradigm and draw on all the literary tools employed by other genres. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A History of the Polish Americans

A History of the Polish Americans PDF Author: John.J. Bukowczyk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135153520X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
In the last, rootless decade families, neighborhoods, and communities have disintegrated in the face of gripping social, economic, and technological changes. Th is process has had mixed results. On the positive side, it has produced a mobile, volatile, and dynamic society in the United States that is perhaps more open, just, and creative than ever before. On the negative side, it has dissolved the glue that bound our society together and has destroyed many of the myths, symbols, values, and beliefs that provided social direction and purpose. In A History of the Polish Americans, John J. Bukowczyk provides a thorough account of the Polish experience in America and how some cultural bonds loosened, as well as the ways in which others persisted.

Childhood and Other Neighborhoods

Childhood and Other Neighborhoods PDF Author: Stuart Dybek
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226176581
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In Stuart Dybek's Chicago, wonder lurks in unexpected places—in garbage-strewn alleys, gloomy basement apartments, abandoned rooms at the top of rickety stairs periodically rumbled by passing el trains. Transformed through the wide eyes of Dybek's adolescent heroes, these grimy urban backwaters become exotic landscapes of fear-filled possibility, of dreams not yet turned to nightmares. Chronicling what happens when Old World faith meets the dark side of the American dream, Dybek's poignant stories of coming of age in Chicago alternately appall, amaze, and just simply entertain.

Italian Signs, American Streets

Italian Signs, American Streets PDF Author: Fred L. Gardaphé
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective--variously historical, philosophical, and cultural--by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention. Gardaphé draws on Vico's concept of history, as well as the work of Gramsci, to establish a culture-specific approach to reading Italian American literature. He begins his historical reading with narratives informed by oral traditions, primarily autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by immigrants. From these earliest social-realist narratives, Gardaphé traces the evolution of this literature through tales of "the godfather" and the mafia; the "reinvention of ethnicity" in works by Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso; the move beyond ethnicity in fiction by Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino; to the short fiction of Mary Caponegro, which points to a new direction in Italian American writing. The result is both an ethnography of Italian American narrative and a model for reading the signs that mark the "self-fashioning" inherent in literary and cultural production. Italian Signs, American Streets promises to become a landmark in the understanding of literature and culture produced by Italian Americans. It will be of interest not only to students, critics, and scholars of this ethnic experience, but also to those concerned with American literature in general and the place of immigrant and ethnic literatures within that wide framework.

Traitors and True Poles

Traitors and True Poles PDF Author: Karen Majewski
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821441116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland’s reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it. By introducing these varied and forgotten works into the scholarly discussion, Traitors and True Poles recasts the literary landscape to include the immigrant community’s own competing visions of itself. The conversation between Polonia’s creative voices illustrates how immigrants manipulated often difficult economic, social, and political realities to provide a place for and a sense of themselves. What emerges is a fuller picture of American literature, one vital to the creation of an ethnic consciousness. This is the first extended look at Polish-language fiction written by turn-of-the-century immigrants, a forgotten body of American ethnic literature. Addressing a blind spot in our understanding of immigrant and ethnic identity and culture, Traitors and True Poles challenges perceptions of a silent and passive Polish immigration by giving back its literary voice.

From Shadow to Presence

From Shadow to Presence PDF Author: Jelena Šesnić
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042022175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This volume departs from a more static concept of identity politics to engage the varied and entangled processes of ethnic/racial, national, and gender identifications in a range of contemporary US ethnic texts (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s). Recognizing the growing salience of variously named ethnic, multicultural, and minority literatures as they are produced and circulated in the USA and worldwide nowadays, this work charts four broadly defined models of approaching such texts: cultural nationalism, ethnic feminism, borderlands and contact zones, and finally, the diasporic model. Drawing extensively on psychoanalytic theory, feminist/gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and its revision of ethnography, the book offers a fresh, engaged, theoretically, and analytically well-rehearsed overview of the distinctive and determining features of a rapidly expanding domain of contemporary US literary production, namely, ethnic literatures. Of potential interest to scholars of American/US literature, but also minority and postcolonial literatures, and to students of American literature, the book attempts an interethnic comparative approach to well- and lesser-known texts. Among the authors represented are Shawn Wong, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Denise Chávez, Rolando Hinojosa, Roberto Fernández and Edwidge Danticat.

The Invention of Ethnicity

The Invention of Ethnicity PDF Author: Werner Sollors Professor of American Literature and Afro-American Studies Harvard University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198021496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This important new collection of interdisciplinary essays sets out to chart the cultural construction of "ethnicity" as embodied in American ethnic literature. Looking at a diverse set of texts, the contributors place the subject in broad historical and dynamic contexts, focusing on the larger systems within which ethnic distinctions emerge and obtain recognition. It provides a new critical framework for understanding not only ethnic literature, but also the underlying psychological, historical, social, and cultural forces. Table of Contents: On the Fourth of July in Sitka, Ishmael Reed. Introduction: The Invention of Ethnicity, Werner Sollors. An American Writer, Richard Rodriguez. A Plea for Fictional Histories and Old-Time "Jewesses", Alide Cagidemetrio. Ethnicity as Festive Culture: Nineteenth-Century German-America on Parade, Kathleen Conzen. Defining the Race, 1890-1930, Judith Stein. Anzia Yezierska and the Making of an Ethnic American Self, Mary Dearborn. Deviant Girls and Dissatisfied Women: A Sociologist's Tale, Carla Cappeti. Ethnic Trilogies: A Genealogical and Generational Poetics, William Boelhower. Blood in the Market Place: The Business of Family in the Godfather Narratives, Thomas Ferraro. Comping for Count Basie, Albert Murray. Is Ethnicity Obsolete, Ishmael Reed, Andrew Hope, Shawn Wong, and Bob Callahan.

Selling the Lite of Heaven

Selling the Lite of Heaven PDF Author: Suzanne Strempek Shea
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439122067
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Advertising to sell her engagement ring after being left at the altar by a man who decided to enter the clergy instead, a young woman meets Randy, a recently engaged prospective buyer who keeps coming back to see her.

First Farm in the Valley

First Farm in the Valley PDF Author: Anne Pellowski
Publisher: Bethlehem Books
ISBN: 1932350241
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Six-year-old Anna Pellowski’s older siblings, Jacob, Franciszek, Barney, Mary and Pauline are exposed to English at school, but only Polish is spoken at home. The younger children—Anna, Julian, Anton barely know a word of their new country’s language, but then neither do many of their neighbors. When the family goes to town to celebrate the 100th birthday of the United States, the speaker gives his speech in a mix of German, Polish, Bohemian and Norwegian! Some years before, in the mid 1800’s, Anna’s mother, father and brother Baby Jacob had come from Poland to live in a tiny sod house in Western Wisconsin and establish the very first farm in the entire Latsch Valley. Now the growing family lives in a real house, with neighbors on every side, and the world for quietly curious Anna is filled with fascinating possibilities—as well as lots of hard work. Sometimes she dreams of going back to the Poland she is always hearing about, but increasingly she realizes that life in Latsch Valley, with its rich cultural rhythm of work, play and religious faith, holds everything she could possibly want.

Polish Americans

Polish Americans PDF Author: James S. Pula
Publisher: VNR AG
ISBN: 9780805784275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The Polish American community has long been identified with three characteristics that the early immigrants brought with them to America, writes Pula: "an affection and concern for their ancestral homeland, a deep religious faith, and a sense of shared cultural values." Prominent among these values are family loyalty, a desire for property ownership, and pride in self-sufficiency.