A01=Marianna De Marco Torgovnick
america
american
anglo saxon
Author_Marianna De Marco Torgovnick
autobiography
biography
boundaries
brooklyn
Category=DNBM
Category=DSB
Category=JBCC
Category=NHK
city
class
classism
college
coming of age
critic
cultural
culture
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
goals
growing up
influential
italian
jewish
literary
locale
marriage
mobility
neighborhood
new york
protestant
regional
scholar
social
true story
united states
urban
wasp
white
working
Product details
- ISBN 9780226808307
- Weight: 255g
- Dimensions: 14 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jan 1997
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Growing up an Italian-American in the Bensonhurst neighbourhood of New York city, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick longed for college, culture, and upward mobility. Her daydreams circled around WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) heroes on television - like Robin Hood and the Cartwright family - but in Brooklyn she never encountered any. So she associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street that divides the working-class Italian neighbourhood where she was born from the middle-class Jewish neighbourhood into which she married. This book is Torgovnick's unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in American life, of what it means to be an Italian American woman who became a scholar and literary critic. Included are autobiographical moments interw oven with engrossing interpretations of American cultural icons from Dr. Dolittle to Lionel Trilling, "The Godfather" to Camille Paglia. The author's experiences allow her to probe the cultural tensions in America caused by competing ideas of individuality and community, upward mobility and ethnic loyalty, acquisitiveness and spirituality.
