Search Results

Simona Griffo, Detective Hero: A Series of “troublems”

Carol Bonomo Jennngs and Christine Palamidessi Moore

in American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women

In some murder mysteries, the amateur sleuth created by Camilla T. Crespi is Simona Griffo. She wears no fedora, nor does she talk out of the corner of her mouth. She is a transplanted Italian ... More

In some murder mysteries, the amateur sleuth created by Camilla T. Crespi is Simona Griffo. She wears no fedora, nor does she talk out of the corner of her mouth. She is a transplanted Italian employed by a small New York advertising agency. From the first volume, Simona's Italian identity is built up through her zest for good food, preference for espresso, intuitive bonding with other Italian characters, experience in dubbing films in Italy, reversion to Italian speech when upset and especially through recollections of Rome — as when she sees a knife-sharpened little pencil and “remembered the Roman greengrocers, spare stubs safely secured behind their ears, adding up the bill on rough, wheat-yellow paper.” For Simona Griffo, freelancing amateur beset by “troublems,” to probe criminal acts and intents is not only a matter of answering questions and abetting justice.Less

Roman Heroic Reciprocity

in The Commerce of War: Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic

This chapter reports the socioeconomic relations in the Aeneid, arguing that Vergil presents reciprocal practices as choiceworthy and effective in bringing social solidarity. Vergil provides his epic ... More

This chapter reports the socioeconomic relations in the Aeneid, arguing that Vergil presents reciprocal practices as choiceworthy and effective in bringing social solidarity. Vergil provides his epic world with a socioeconomic dimension that is aligned with the dominant aristocratic view offered by Cicero. Violated hospitium and deadly gifts are the main themes of failed reciprocity that run through the poem. In characters such as Sinon and Dolon, greed is the desire that impels the individual forward and commodity exchange the form of action the individual takes to attain the desired object. The cases of Polydorus and Camilla show that greed can undo reciprocal bonds when it is acted upon directly, without the mediation of a socioeconomic type such as the merchant. That Vergil limits himself to exemplifying a subset of the attitudes and behaviors comprehended by Roman economic morality is not to say that he avoids confronting its potential contradictions.Less

“Sad Flower in the Sand”: Camilla Lopez and the Erasure of Memory in Ask the Dust

Meagan Meylor

in John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views

While scholars of Ask the Dust have given considerable attention to the novel’s protagonist Arturo Bandini, his Mexican American love interest Camilla Lopez has been relatively neglected. Scholarship ... More

While scholars of Ask the Dust have given considerable attention to the novel’s protagonist Arturo Bandini, his Mexican American love interest Camilla Lopez has been relatively neglected. Scholarship concerning Camilla has been limited to her destructive relationship with Arturo and her attempts at adopting Hollywood values. By foregrounding the figure of Camilla through the socio-historical lens of the marginalization and deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the 1930s, this chapter offers important insights into Fante’s novel, most notably in its treatment of ethnic identities within Los Angeles. It also provides a feminist reading of Ask the Dust by examining Fante’s treatment of working-class female subjectivity and of how Camilla’s recurring presence and absence draw attention to the Mexican past of Los Angeles, a history often erased in the city’s collective memory.Less

Dancing with the Dust: Translating Ask the Dust to the Stage

J’aime Morrison

in John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views

This essay reconstructs the process of creating DUST, an original dance-theatre adaptation of John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust. The essay details the director’s work with student actors, faculty ... More

This essay reconstructs the process of creating DUST, an original dance-theatre adaptation of John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust. The essay details the director’s work with student actors, faculty designers, and production team, and explores the methods used in the process of devising this adaptation. The performative relationship between movement and language, words and choreography, is emphasized throughout. Character analysis focusing on the tangled histories of Camilla and Arturo as outsiders suggests the persistence of loss that attends the experience of displacement caused by emigration, exile, and other such dislocations. The writing in the essay seeks to replicate the imaginative process of creating an embodied translation of this haunting novel.Less

Bastards of U.S. Imperialism: Demanding Recognition in the American Family

Faye Caronan

in Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique

This chapter explores the possibilities and limitations for Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critique by focusing on two documentary films: Camilla Benilao Griggers's Memories of a ... More

This chapter explores the possibilities and limitations for Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critique by focusing on two documentary films: Camilla Benilao Griggers's Memories of a Forgotten War (2001) and Rosie Perez's Yo soy Boricua, pa'que tu lo Sepas! (I'm Puerto Rican, Just So You Know!) (2006). It considers how these two films resurrect a metaphor used to justify U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, one that imagined colonialism as paternal relationship, to discuss the notion of colonial illegitimacy. It shows how the films connect their narrators' familial illegitimacy to the metaphorical illegitimacy that manifests as illegitimate narratives that are disavowed by hegemonic narratives of U.S. benevolent assimilation and exceptionalism. The chapter argues that the films resurrect the metaphors of imperialism as heterosexual romance and paternal benevolence to question the narrative of U.S. colonial benevolence.Less

Non uiribus aequis: Some problems in Virgil’s battle-scenes

Nicholas Horsfall

in Fifty Years at the Sibyl's Heels: Selected Papers on Virgil and Rome

Virgil, it has long been recognized, radically alters the sequence, schedule, participants, and alliances in the battles fought between Aeneas’ landing and the founding of Lavinium; they are above ... More

Virgil, it has long been recognized, radically alters the sequence, schedule, participants, and alliances in the battles fought between Aeneas’ landing and the founding of Lavinium; they are above all drastically simplified in structure and shortened in time. Nothing suggests that Virgil’s source material contained the inherited names of numerous participants. In particular, the number of inherited major warriors is severely restricted, which entails problems of narrative development. The careful reader of Aeneid 9–12 will also be greatly struck by the almost total absence of important secondary characters in whom the reader may take a growing interest. Virgil labours under a self-imposed problem: how to write an epic of war in four books, given a tiny cast of major figures.Less

Dux Femina

Caitlin C. Gillespie

in Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain

Chapter 5 analyzes Tacitus’s image of Boudica as a warrior woman and considers the challenges she poses to Roman conceptions of masculinity. Whereas other women and wives become observers, placed on ... More

Chapter 5 analyzes Tacitus’s image of Boudica as a warrior woman and considers the challenges she poses to Roman conceptions of masculinity. Whereas other women and wives become observers, placed on the outskirts of the battlefield, Boudica is a commander woman (dux femina), comparable to Vergil’s Dido. Several models and antimodels emerge from Roman history and myth to color a Roman reader’s interpretation of Boudica as a dux femina, including Camilla, Cleopatra, and the women of Tacitus’s ethnographic work, the Germania. Unlike other Roman female leaders, including Fulvia, Agrippina the Elder, and Agrippina the Younger, Boudica spurs on men to prove their masculinity. Boudica’s revolt becomes an insurrection not only against servitude, but also against Roman notions of masculinity and femininity, and leadership without morality. Boudica’s sex becomes a powerful tool to rouse her troops to fight for just vengeance, and to promise to win or die trying.Less