Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 4-5-2018 Development of a Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, and Cosmopolitan Lines of Inquiry to Reveal the Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, and Antonio D’Alfonso Anna Ciamparella Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, Italian Language and Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Ciamparella, Anna, "Development of a Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, and Cosmopolitan Lines of Inquiry to Reveal the Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, and Antonio D’Alfonso" (2018). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4563. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4563 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. DEVELOPMENT OF A LITERARY DISPOSITIF: CONVENING DIASPORAN, BLUES, AND COSMOPOLITAN LINES OF INQUIRY TO REVEAL THE CULTURAL DIALOGUE AMONG GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND ANTONIO D’ALFONSO A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdisciplinary Program in Comparative Literature by Anna Ciamparella M.A. Italian Studies, Florida State University, 2012 M.A. English, Florida Gulf Coast University, 2014 May 2018 To Oriana patiently waiting my return… ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My career as a student has come to an end. Soon I will be opening another chapter of my life, hopefully as an academic. Mine has been a long journey that began as a childhood dream in which I saw myself teaching literature at a university level. In 2003, various circumstances took me to leave my native country and settle in America. Here I had to recreate a new me by translating who I was into English, a language that until then I did not know how to speak, let alone how to write. Like many of my Italian ancestors, I arrived in the United States with very little money, a suitcase that was too big, and oblivious of what was ahead of me. My cultural bricolage has been adventurous and challenging all at once, but in the meantime, I had the fortune to cross the path of wonderful mentors and friends who facilitated my metamorphosis. These people believed in what I had to offer and supported me every step of the way, making sure that when I stumbled, as indeed I tripped a few times, I could get up again, and stronger. It is difficult to find the right words to express the high regard I have for Professor William Q. Boelhower who went above and beyond to help me succeed. A simple acknowledgment here cannot be enough. Professor Boelhower has been and will always be my maestro, the finest mentor with whom I shared the most enriching exchanges, the longest emails, poetry in its embryonic state, and many paninis on the campus ground. My gratitude goes to Professor Greg Stone and Professor Adelaide Russo for having questioned the methodology I adopted in this study. By doing so, they gave me the opportunity to achieve theoretical clarity. I feel deeply indebted to Dr. Solimar Otero for having introduced me to Caribbean Literature and for being there every time I needed advice and guidance. My gratitude goes, again, to my mentors at Florida Gulf Coast University Professor Myra Mendible and Dr. Delphine Grass who encouraged me to become a comparativist, and to Professor Mark Pietralunga my mentor at Florida State University who is following me through my professional growth. I am grateful to iii Lois Edmonds for helping me with bureaucratic procedures, but especially for the unforgettable affection she showed me in one of the most terrible moments of my life. Finally, I express my gratitude to Antonio D’Alfonso for sharing with me his published works and many of his creations still in progress, for agreeing to meet my students via Skype in Spring 2016, and for giving me the interview that appears in the Appendix A of this dissertation. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………..iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………..vii INTRODUCTION: THE LESSON OF ATLANTIC STUDIES………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS A LITERARY DISPOSITIF? A CRITIQUE OF TRADITIONAL COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO LITERATURE: TOWARD THE FORMATION OF A NEW READING MODEL………………………………………………………………………11 Why the Literary Dispositif?..............................................................................................28 CHAPTER 2: COMBINING DIASPORAS: AFRICAN-ITALIAN-AMERICAN INTERSECTIONS……………………………………………………………….47 Forming Diasporan Relations: From the ‘Entrails’ of the Boat in Giuseppe Ungaretti’s “Monologhetto” to Langston Hughes’ Short Stories…………………………………….51 Ancestral Homelands and Cultural Associations with the Hostland: Italy, Africa, and Canada……………………………………………………………………………………66 An Italian-African-American Double Consciousness…………………………………...82 CHAPTER 3: TUNES OF CULTURAL AND EMOTIONAL INTERSECTIONS: THE BLUES ACCORDING TO LANGSTON HUGHES, GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI, AND ANTONO D’ALFONSO…………………………………………………….....106 Understanding the Blues of Langston Hughes: Black Masses and the Man of the Crowd…………………………………………………………………113 A strappo in fondo all’anima (a deep sprain inside the soul): The Blues of Giuseppe Ungaretti……………………………………………………………………………….130 Speaking About the “Irrelevant Man”: The Blues of Antonio D’Alfonso…………….152 CHAPTER 4: COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITIES ACCORDING TO LANGSTON HUGHES, GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI, AND ANTONIO D’ALFONSO……..170 Cultural Convergences of Giuseppe Ungaretti and His Connections to Transnational Blacks…………………………………………………………………………...............174 Langston Hughes: From ‘Man of the World’ to Cosmopolitan Patriot………………...185 A Man of the World: Universal Emotional Experience and Italian Ethnicity as a Cosmopolitan Category in Avril ou l’anti-passion (Fabrizio’s Passion)………………201 CHAPTER 5: MEETING THE ITALIANS, THE AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE ITALIAN CANADIANS AT ETHNIC AND HISTORICAL INTERSECTIONS……………………………………………………………..224 The Italian Risorgimento and the American Civil War………………………………..226 Cultural Matrix: Ethnic Contiguity Between the Italian Canadian and the African American Experience…………………………………………………………………..249 CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………………………………….276 v REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………280 APPENDIX A: WHAT A FAILURE ARE WE TALING ABOUT? AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTONIO D’ALFONSO……………………………………………….........298 APPENDIX B: BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI, LANGSTON HUGHES, AND ANTONIO D’ALFONSO……………………………………………....312 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………318 vi ABSTRACT This dissertation seeks to create a literary dialogue among the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the African American author Langston Hughes, and the Quebecois writer Antonio D’Alfonso. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Langston Hughes were more or less contemporaries. Ungaretti was born in 1888 and Hughes in 1902, and both were active in modernist movements that shaped the literary history of their own countries. D’Alfonso was born in Canada about half a center after Ungaretti and Hughes. Besides significant generational differences, these three authors also underwent personal and intellectual experiences that shaped their writing in seemingly incomparable ways. While a traditional comparative approach to them would set out by acknowledging what they have in common and how they diverge, this dissertation project will identify where and how their lives and writings intersect by using a reading construct called literary dispositif. Briefly put, this research offers a reshaping of Foucault’s allusive dispositif and defines literary dispositif as the simultaneous assembling of lines of inquiry that yields to underlining the implicit communicability existing among various literary traditions, which can be compared beyond ordinary categories of similarity and difference. By using notions such as diaspora, blues, and cosmopolitanism as the three main lines of inquiry, the literary dispositif developed here shows that the works of Ungaretti, Hughes, and D’Alfonso represent a literary constellation. The objectives of this study are the following: outline a new theoretical perspective by creating a comparative paradigm to understand the cultural interconnectedness already imbedded in literary artifacts; demonstrate how these paradigms reflect the kind of interrelated worlds in which Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, and Antonio D’Alfonso lived; further the scholarship on these three authors by offering a novel critical assessment of their poetry, travelogues, and political and critical writing. Giuseppe vii Ungaretti is seen as a blues poet, for, especially his earlier verse responds to the personal turmoil of the author in a manner that resonates with the literary blues, and the writing of Langston Hughes and Antonio D’Alfonso are interpreted beyond their respective ethnicities, categories that have been