A unique psychological portrait of an urban working-class teacher, and the dynamics of teaching itself.
Author: Dorothy Bryant
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558611746
Category: Fiction
Page: 186
View: 326
A unique psychological portrait of an urban working-class teacher, and the dynamics of teaching itself.Miss. Giardino. O that Iwere as great As is my grief, or lesser than my name! Or that I could forget what I have been! Or not remember what I must be now!
Author: Kenneth Scambray
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838641170
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 211
View: 245
In Queen Calafia's Paradise, Ken Scambray explains that California offers Italian American protagonists a unique cultural landscape in which to define what it means to be an American and how Italian American protagonists embark on a voyage to reconcile their Old World heritage with modern American society. In Pasinetti's From the Academy Bridge (1970), Scambray analyzes the influence of Pasinetti's diverse California landscape upon his protagonist. Scambray argues that any reading of Madalena's Confetti for Gino (1959), set in San Diego's Little Italy, must take into account Madalena's homosexuality and his little known homosexual World War II novel, The Invisible Glass (1950). In his chapters covering John Fante's Los Angeles fiction, Scambray explores the Italian American's quest to locate a home in Southern California. Ken Scambray teaches courses in North American Italian literature and Los Angeles fiction at the University of La Verne.... and struggle with daughter , 80 , 81-82 , 90-91 Giardino , Anna ( Miss Giardino ) , 95 , 99 , 117 , 140 , 190 , 219nn21-22 , 24 ; amnesia and dreams of ...
Author: Mary Jo Bona
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809322587
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 253
View: 161
Mary Jo Bona reconstructs the literary history and examines the narrative techniques of eight Italian American women's novels from 1940 to the present. Largely neglected until recently, these women's family narratives compel a reconsideration of what it means to be a woman and an ethnic in America. Bona discusses the novels in pairs according to their focus on Italian American life. She first examines the traditions of italianitá (a flavor of things Italian) that inform and enhance works of fiction. The novelists in that tradition were Mari Tomasi (Like Lesser Gods, 1949) and Marion Benasutti (No Steady Job for Papa, 1966). Bona then turns to later novels that highlight the Italian American belief in the family's honor and reputation. Conflicts between generations, specifically between autocratic fathers and their children, are central to Octavia Waldo's 1961 A Cup of the Sun and Josephine Gattuso Hendin's 1988 The Right Thing to Do. Even when writers choose to steer away from the familial focus, Bona notes, their developmental narratives trace the reintegration of characters suffering from a crisis of cultural identity. Relating the characters' struggles to their relationship to the family, Bona examines Diana Cavallo's 1961 A Bridge of Leaves and Dorothy Bryant's 1978 Miss Giardino. Bona then discusses two innovative novels—Helen Barolini's 1979 Umbertina and Tina De Rosa's 1980 Paper Fish—both of which feature a granddaughter who invokes her grandmother, a godparent figure. Through Barolini's feminist and De Rosa's modernist perspectives, both novels present a young girl developing artistically. Closing with a discussion of the contemporary terrain Italian American women traverse, Bona examines such topics as sexual identity when it meets cultural identity and the inclusion of italianitá when Italian American identity is not central to the story. Italian American women writers, she concludes, continue in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on the interplay between cultural identity and women's development.“Miss Giardino, you're so mean!” “Miss Giardino, you a racist!” She notes the irony: “When I started teaching I was looked down on and called a dago.
Author: Geraldine J. Clifford
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9781421419794
Category: Education
Page: 496
View: 363
Those Good Gertrudes explores the professional, civic, and personal roles of women teachers throughout American history. Its voice, themes, and findings build from the mostly unpublished writings of many women and their families, colleagues, and pupils. Geraldine J. Clifford studied personal history manuscripts in archives and consulted printed autobiographies, diaries, correspondence, oral histories, interviews—even film and fiction—to probe the multifaceted imagery that has surrounded teaching. This broad ranging, inclusive, and comparative work surveys a long past where schoolteaching was essentially men's work, with women relegated to restricted niches such as teaching rudiments of the vernacular language to young children and socializing girls for traditional gender roles. Clifford documents and explains the emergence of women as the prototypical schoolteachers in the United States, a process apparent in the late colonial period and continuing through the nineteenth century, when they became the majority of American public and private schoolteachers. The capstone of Clifford’s distinguished career and the definitive book on women teachers in America, Those Good Gertrudes will engage scholars in the history of education and women’s history, teachers past, present, and future, and readers with vivid memories of their own teachers. "Clifford's book is a timely blessing, the history of teachers are at last accorded their own integrity instead of as appendages in other fields of study."— San Francisco Book Review "Clifford’s colleagues around the world have long anticipated Those Good Gertrudes. They will find the wait exceedingly worthwhile. The book’s scope and depth can now incite new generations of students to reflect on and investigate the repercussions of teaching and learning—activities still driven essentially by women both in the U.S. and globally."—Donald R. Warren, Indiana University "Those ‘Good Gertrudes’—the women who dedicated some part of their lives to teaching—finally have a great historian to tell this important, missing story. Professor Geraldine J. Clifford has brought together an intense combination of extended research, fresh archival information, and the insightful interpretation that only wisdom can bring to scholarship. This stands as a landmark work in the social history of education."—John R. Thelin, author of A History of American Higher Education The first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in education, Geraldine J. Clifford is professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Institutions, 1870–1937.Her novel Miss Giardino uses an episode from her immigrant mother's childhood . Bryant holds a B.A. in music and an M.A. in creative writing and for many ...
Author: Helen Barolini
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815606621
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 416
View: 822
Drawing on rare sources and archival material, Helen Barolini has here collected 56 works by Italian American women writers. The volume features: prose, poetry, one play and a large section of fiction.In 1978, Dorothy Calvetti Bryant published Miss Giardino. a novel that explores issues of gender, age, ethnicity, and class. 54.
Author: A. Kenneth Ciongoli
Publisher:
ISBN: UOM:39015040574876
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 320
View: 219
A long overdue collection of memoirs and scholarlyreflections on growing up Italian and American.San Francisco Chronicle Miss Giardino (1978) "A fine book." Library Journal "Poignant and believable." May Sarton The Garden of Eros (1979) "A. poem, ...
Author: Dorothy Bryant
Publisher:
ISBN: PSU:000046997371
Category: Fiction
Page: 176
View: 974
A bond grows between Sally Morgan, a fifty-year-old woman whose marriage is dissolving and whose children no longer need her, and the twenty-five-year-old prison inmate she corresponds with and encourages to write poetryHad Miss Giardino been rolling around with her teenage son? Had Elizabeth been paying her to—she could barely bring herself to consider it—fuck Zach?
Author: Graham Norton
Publisher: Washington Square Press
ISBN: 9781982117771
Category: Fiction
Page: 320
View: 213
From Graham Norton—the BAFTA Award–winning Irish television host and author of the “charming debut novel” (New York Journal of Books) Holding—a masterly and haunting tale of secrets and ill-fated love follows a young woman as she returns to Ireland after her mother’s death and unravels the identity of her father. When Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother’s death, she’s focused only on saying goodbye to that dark and dismal part of her life. Her childhood home is packed solid with useless junk, her mother’s presence already fading. But within this mess, she discovers a small stash of letters—and ultimately, the truth. Forty years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the night quiet except for the constant wind that encircles her as she hurries deeper into the darkness away from the cliffs and the sea. She has no sense of where she is going, only that she must keep on. With wistful and evocative prose, A Keeper is sure to appeal to “fans of sensitive character studies” (Publishers Weekly) and brilliantly illustrates Graham Norton’s clear-eyed understanding of human nature and its darkest flaws.Miss Giardino was the first of the Ata Books , brought out by Bryant as her own publisher . With no one to object to her virtuosity , Bryant began producing ...
Author: Western Literature Association (U.S.)
Publisher: TCU Press
ISBN: 0875651755
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 1031
View: 951
Given in honor of District Governor Hugh Summers and Mrs. Ahnise Summers by the Rotary Club of Aggieland with matching support from the Sara and John H. Lindsey '44 Fund, Texas A & M University Press, 2004.Steve described how he saw Miss Giardino in the morning, striding down the hall. I used to imagine running with you. Always in my fantasies we were in ...
Author: Howard S. Fuller
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1467832324
Category: Religion
Page: 244
View: 489
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, here would be no dance and there is only the dance. (T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets) The metaphor of the dance is one I have chosen to describe the movement of the Spirit in my life as pastor in a small Protestant congregation in northern California during 197888. I dance a light and joyful dance when I remember that God in Christ is the still point of the dance around which the various parts of myself arrange themselves. As the people of God and I dance together we become a healing energy field in which the Holy Spirit powerfully moves . I have written this book in gratitude for the gift of the presence of the Christ as the creator of our dance together with all creation. It is a book for pastors and for students in training for church ministry, but it is for lovers, parents, business executives, and teachers as well. I invite you, my brothers and sisters, to dance with me. From a colleague: Your book is very good; very readable, very insightful and sometimes profound. I appreciate your open (and courageous) description of your personal spiritual journey, also your description of Psychosynthesis and its possible manner of application to ones self and to the activity of the Church. . . . I think . . . that your work could be particularly helpful as a teaching tool for ministers and Seminarians. THE PASTOR WHO LEARNED TO DANCE: HOW I LEARNED TO BE MYSELF IN THE CHURCH by Howard S. FullerHere is what Dorothy Bryant , novelist and author of Miss Giardino , wrote me when I was compiling The Dream Book : “ Calvetti is my maiden name , and the ...
Author: Helen Barolini
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 029916084X
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 224
View: 973
"A lively, lucid, and often extremely moving collection of essays."--Sandra Gilbert, author of Wrongful Death: A Memoir "Barolini's essays moved me. Their commitment, their passion, their intelligence struck me very powerfully and made them among the most incisive essays on Italian-Americana, ethnicity, and diversity in literature that I have ever read."--Fred Misurella, author of Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs and Short Time Part memoir, part social commentary, and part literary criticism, Chiaroscuro is not only profoundly original but also of crucial importance in establishing the contours of an Italian-American tradition. Spanning a quarter century of work, the essays in Helen Barolini's essays explore her personal search; literature as a formative influence; and the turning of the personal into the political. Included in Chiaroscuro is an updated re-introduction to Barolini's American Book Award-winning collection, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women.For the30yearold malenarrator of A BridgeofLeaves andthe68yearold retired high school teacher of Miss Giardino, healthy development means returning in ...
Author: Salvatore J. LaGumina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781135583323
Category: History
Page: 735
View: 970
First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.In Dorothy Bryant's novel , Miss Giardino , the personal fears and doubts that I thought isolated me were placed in a broader cultural context of ...
Author: Carol L. Birch
Publisher: august house
ISBN: 0874835666
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 128
View: 907
Reading a story silently is a private act; hearing one told aloud is a communal act. Like musical scores that come to life when played, stories take on an added dimension when shared aurally. Carol Birch - storyteller, children's librarian, and teacher - tackles the slippery topic of the difference between memorizing a written story, reciting it aloud, telling it directly and engagingly to a group of listeners.... novels such as Marion Benasutti's No SteadyJob for Papa (1966) or Dorothy Bryant's Miss Giardino (1979), being sometimes equated to a form of madness.
Author: Paola Loreto
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 9781527544079
Category: Political Science
Page: 348
View: 964
Environmental and global outlooks are currently at the center of the most lively and urgent international scholarship. This volume serves to overcome the self-referentiality of American studies by intersecting the study of American literature and history with the questions and concerns raised by these perspectives. It re-conceptualizes the mutual and shifting positions of center(s) and margin(s), and subject(s) and object(s) in terms of relation and an inclusive structure of relations based on an ecological ethics. The contributions here explore many methodological hypotheses, ranging from Christa Greve-Vollp’s work on eco-cosmopolitanism to Peter Bardaglio’s report on US climate activism, as well as the ecocritical and ecofeminist viewpoints of Scott Slovic and Greta Gaard respectively. In addition to contributing to academic discourse, the essays—written by both young and established international scholars, and coherently arranged into four thematic sections—explore topics that are of interest to the broader public. The issues discussed here include identity and new forms of belonging; migration and the environment; ecolanguage, ecopoetry and ecopoetics; translation and multilingualism; animal studies; environmental activism; shifting geographies; and ecofeminism.In three of them (Miss Giardino, A Day in San Francisco, and The Test), the central, point-of- view character is an obviously good teacher-in the case of ...
Author: Dorothy Bryant
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 9781936932535
Category: Fiction
Page: 430
View: 534
“Describes a life that explores, in ways that only fine fiction can, the differences between myth and illusion, between real psychic gifts and false ones.”—The Denver Post This American Book Award Winner follows the story of the young Mei-li Murrow who is dubbed “Madame Psyche” after she accidentally predicts the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Although she wins fame and fortune, Mei-li seeks a truer spirituality, and embarks on a pilgrimage that takes her to the death-soaked Europe of the First World War, to a utopian commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 1920s, to the Depression-era migrant work camps and cannery strikes, and finally to the Napa State Hospital, where she finds wisdom and peace among the outcasts of the asylum. Mei-li’s modern-day epic is grounded in the history of Northern California in the first half of the twentieth century and peopled by comrades of many classes and cultures and by lovers both male and female. Yet her central odyssey remains one of inner discovery. In Confessions of Madame Psyche, Dorothy Bryant has created a character who is so honest in her search for truth, growth, and spiritual understanding that this quest becomes inherent to her survival. “Breathtaking and heartbreaking . . . It is in the specifics of time and place that Bryant roots the book’s magic. It is in her characterizations that the magic convinces . . . A beautiful story has, very simply, told itself.”—The Denver Post “Fascinating and beautiful.”—Ursula K. LeGuin “Intricate, appealing [and] profound.”—Women’s Review of Books... Miss Giardino , Confessions of Madame Psyche ( for which she won the American ... Bryant's Tea with Mrs. Hardy ( 1992 ) and The Panel ( 1996 ) were also ...
Author: Emmanuel S. Nelson
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN: 031333059X
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 2692
View: 522
Alphabetically arranged entries in five chronological volumes focus on individual authors, works, and topics related to multiethnic American literature.Dorothy Bryant , novelist and author of Miss Giardino , wrote me when I was compiling The Dream Book : Calvetti is my maiden name , and the childhood of ...
Author: Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1557532435
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 357
View: 640
How does ones heritage impact creativity? Breaking Open explores the deep connection between prominent Italian American women writers, their heritage, and their writing. In-depth discussions of these writers' family traditions and memories of growing up in an American culture as an Italian child, including the difficulties of dueling dialects and dual cultures, explain how their unique cultural connections have impacted their work. For many of these writers, there has been a distinctive separation between their involvement with their families, immersed as they were in the culture the immigrants brought to this country, and their eventual rise to positions of prominence in academic or literary circles in the United States. While reading Breaking Open, readers are encouraged to determine for themselves whether or not this is the case. In trying to establish a unified identity, Italian American women writers face conflicting home values, those steeped in the traditions of the Italians (immigrants) and those values emerging out of a sense of what it means to be Italian-American. These differing views are further confounded by the beliefs of the overarching American society. As writers, they discuss the ways these conflicts are represented in their works and discuss the ways their childhood memories of immigrants and their practices have been a strong foundation for their creativity. In addition, five scholars in the field of Italian American literature critically analyze works by many of the creative writers in this anthology and discuss the future of the field.