Fabio Ferrari

Myths and Counter Myths of America

Italian fantasies of America’s apocalyptic Otherness continue to function along the same culturally-defensive lines evidenced in more distant eras, from 1492 to 1929 to 2001. What is the theoretical cause of this historically resilient attraction-repulsion dynamic? Yesterday, like today, Italian literary and cinematic representations of America’s “imminent collapse” seem to serve as metaphoric and didactic means for “redeeming” the integrity of Italian identity, perceived as corrupted by the symbolic values mythically attributed to the American altrove. In attempting to “save Italian culture” from American corruption, however, or in defining Italian culture and history as counterpoints to America’s lack of culture and history, something has inevitably been lost in the process: select aspects of Italian history have been monumentalized and counter-mythified, while others have been carelessly forgotten or willfully expunged.

Fabio Ferrari is an American-born scholar of Italian Cultural Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Franklin College Switzerland. Following a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Connecticut College (1991), the author taught extensively at the undergraduate level in Rome, Pisa, and Milan; earning both his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2006) from the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. With a previous article on Italian Cinema published in the volume Pagina pellicola pratica (2000), this work constitutes the author’s second publication with Angelo Longo Editore of Ravenna.

Myths and counter-myths of America: New World Allegories in the 20th-Century Italian Literature and Film. Angelo Longo Editore 2008