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The two editors and eighteen scholars and creative nonfiction writers offer a lucid view of a writer who has produced one of the most provocative bodies of memoir writing in contemporary US literature, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: "Habit of Mind" 1
Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta
MemoirLouise DeSalvo's "Even in Death,
La Bella Figura": A Meditation on Honor, Respect, and the Silences That Bind 37
Margaux Fragoso
The Poetics of Trauma: Intertextuality, Rhythm, and Concision in
Vertigo and
Writing as a Way of Healing 50
Peter Covino
Fixing and Fictioning: Memory and Catholicism in
Vertigo 62
Jeana Delrosso
Portrait of the Mother as a Writer and Researcher 75
Julija Sukys
Louise DeSalvo: Essaying Memoir 86
Joshua Fausty
TeachingOn Vulnerability and Risk: Learning to Write and Teach Memoir as a Student of Louise DeSalvo 105
Kym Ragusa
Fixing Things: What Louise DeSalvo Has Taught Me about Writing 111
Emily Bernard
Dark Whiteness and Literacy without Assimilation: DeSalvo's Unlikely Narrative 117
Kimberly A. Costino
Mixing Bowl: On
Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo in the Classroom, and the Day I Got into Hunter 130
Lia Ottaviano
Furthering the Voyage: Reconsidering DeSalvo in Contemporary Woolf Studies 140
Benjamin D. Hagen
CultureThe Context of Louise DeSalvo's
Impact: Incest in Virginia Woolf's Biography 155
Mark Hussey
"Thirty- seven Is the Unraveling Time" and Other Fictions of Fidelity in the Works of Louise DeSalvo 169
Jenn Brandt
Life Online: Skating and Breaking the Surface of the Self 179
Amy Jo Burns
The Fruits of Her Labor: Louise DeSalvo's Memoirs of Food and Family 189
Mary Jo Bona and Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger
Mapping the Female Ethnic Self in the Family Battleground:
Vertigo and the Greek American Novel 210
Theodora Patrona
DeSalvo's Rialto:
On Moving as a Livable Bridge 222
Ilaria Serra
The Knife and the Bread, the Brutal and the Sacred: Louise DeSalvo at the Family Table 233
John Gennari
Afterword. Crazy in the Study: Trying to Claim a Tradition in Louise DeSalvo's Accented Writing 251
Anthony Julian Tamburri
List of Contributors 261
Index 265
About the author
Nancy Caronia (Edited By) Nancy Caronia is a lecturer at University of Rhode Island. She teaches in the Honors Program, Gender & Women's Studies, and in the departments of English and Writing and Rhetoric. She works on issues of transnationalism and globalization in contemporary American and Anglophone ethnic literature and film. Her scholarly essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including
Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture,
New Delta Review, and
Don't Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her introduction to
Casting Off will appear in Bordighera's reprint of DeSalvo's novel.
Edvige Giunta (Edited By) Edvige Giunta is professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she teaches memoir and other literature and writing courses. She is the author of
Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and
Dire l'indicibile. She is co- editor of
The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (with Louise DeSalvo);
Italian American Writers on New Jersey (with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan);
Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick); and
Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (with Joseph Sciorra).
