| This dissertation explores the significance of America as a cultural construct in contemporary Italian literature and film, particularly the role that America holds for Italian Leftist artists and intellectuals who try to shape a responsible, ethical individual engaged with issues of humanism in globalization.;For Italian intellectuals to look at the New World—at “America”—has always been a pretext for reflecting on themselves and their sociopolitical milieu. The Italian Leftist intellectual stands at the intersection of socially engaged artistic production with globalization, issues of subjective ethics, the self, and America. Images of America have an important function in the formation of an ethical individual who uses the national sociopolitical scene as the veranda from which to define her/his position in the world, and the international scene as the arena of his/her ethicality, humanism, and civil commitment. America plays a role in this definition, as is evident in four contemporary Italian novels and three Italian films. Works considered are Alessandro Baricco's City, 1999 (translated as City ); Francesca Durand's Sogni mancini, 1996 (Left-Handed Dreams , 2000); Gina Lagorio's L'arcadia americana, 1996 (The American Arcadia, not yet translated); Andrea De Carlo's Treno di panna, 1981 (The Cream Train, 1987); and the films Non ci resta the piangere, 1984 (Nothing Left but to Cry, directed by Roberto Benigni and Massimo Troisi; not yet distributed in English); Lamerica, 1994 (Gianni Amelio); and Caro diario, 1994 (Dear Diary, Nanni Moretti). Andrea De Carlo's Treno di panna is compared with Jean Baudrillard's Amérique, 1986, and Gina Lagorio's L'arcadia americana with “Ava Gardner's Brother-in-Law,” 1991, a short story by the American author Ben Morreale, in which an American subject observes and comments on the validity of Italian icons of the United States. These works show that, for Italian intellectuals, while the concept of “America” as the elsewhere to run to for the cause of human accomplishment has come to its historical end, a constructive dialogue with America as a geopolitical reality has yet to begin. |
