A View from the Heart of Europe

There are at least three ways of understanding "criticism": 1) as literary scholarship; 2) as teaching; 3) as a way of engaging the general reading public regarding the significance of literary and cultural matters. Every country has developed its own traditions in each of these three areas. This brief essay focuses on the Italian case, arguing that teachers of American literature need to make the most of their role as cultural mediators and translators, as in the formative years of Italian American Studies. The influence of the corporate model on the Italian public university, along with other factors, has made relations between literary scholars' and the nonacademic public sphere tenuous. Unless the democratic political ethos that presided over the birth of the discipline is rediscovered, the future for Italian "American literary criticism–in all the three articulations mentioned above—will be rather bleak.