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Modern Fiction Studies 44.

2 (1998) 462-467

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Book Review
20th-Century Italian Women Writers: The Feminine Experience Oriana Fallaci: The Rhetoric of Freedom Britian, Ireland, and Continental Europe

Alba Amoia. 20th-Century Italian Women Writers: The Feminine Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. xii + 189 pp. John Gatt-Rutter. Oriana Fallaci: The Rhetoric of Freedom. Oxford: Berg, 1996. 212 pp. Alba Amoia's new book, 20th-Century Italian Women Writers offers readers an informative introduction to eleven major Italian women writers and their works, spanning the period from the late 1800s to the mid-1990s. As stated in the preface, the choice of literary and journalistic figures examined is intended to represent both the diversity of women's discourses and, at the same time, their tendency to focus on [End Page 462] the "inner world of the female." Crafted in the style of a literary history, Amoia's study charts the central thematic concerns, stylistic features, and perspectives on life, society, and politics that mark the distinct positions created by the authors within the literary and cultural topography of Italy. Throughout her analysis, Amoia interweaves a rich variety of biographical information and commentary from literary criticism. Following a chronology that includes major events in the private and professional lives of the authors as well as in Italian history and politics, chapters 1 through 3 are dedicated to Grazia Deledda, SibilIa Aleramo, and Gianna Manzini. Amoia approaches Deledda, recipient of the 1926 Nobel Prize for literature, as a regional author who rebelled "against the irrationality of the patriarchal system." Focusing primarily on the novels La via del male, Elias Portolu, Cenere, and Canne al vento, Amoia discusses the popular sources of Deledda's art, and her use of nature, symbol, and myth. She situates the novels by Aleramo and Manzini in relation to the "literature of memory," and profiles their representations of such diverse topics as father-daughter relations, feminine eroticism, and the meanings of "illness" in metaphysics and art. The contemporary, prize-winning literary authors featured in chapters 4 through 8 include Lalla Romano, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Rosetta Loy, and Dacia Maraini. Whereas the novels by Romano may be limited by what Amoia terms an "excessive autobiographical nature," those by Morante, presented as a form of magical realism, create complex visions of adolescence, androgyny, and father-mother-child triangles, as exemplified in Aracoeli and L'isola di Arturo, for example. Amoia provides an attentive assessment of the themes and prose style fashioned by Ginzburg in her early and later novels, as well as in the autobiographical text Lessico famigliare. Likewise, her discussion of Loy's novels raises some insightful points, especially concerning La bicicletta and Le strade di polvere. While noting the significance of Maraini's remarkable contributions to the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography, Amoia gives an instructive overview of the diverse issues and narrative practices elaborated in different stages of her feminist textual production, and devotes special attention to Isolinai La donna tagliata a pezzi and La lunga vita di Marianna Ucra. In the final chapter, Amoia shifts her eye to the works by Matilde Serao, Oriana [End Page 463] Fallaci, and Camilla Cederna, three authors of unquestionable stature in the fields of journalism and cultural commentary. While characterizing Serao as a "militant representative of Italy's naturalistic school of verism," Amoia focuses her study on the

writer's pioneering work in Italian journalism. In the sections devoted to Fallaci and Cederna, she draws out the differences between their journalistic concerns and styles. Amoia situates the former as an innovative reporter and interviewer in the context of the New Journalism, and a bestselling literary author, and highlights the latter's talents for producing "pungent" social commentary in such works as Giovanni Leone: La carriera di un presidente and Il lato debole: Diario italiano. Skillfully avoiding the risk of homogenization that overviews of this kind may run, Amoia effectively conveys the particular traits distinguishing the authors' works in their aesthetic, social, and cultural dimensions. Since Amoia frequently employs the term "literature of memory" as an interpretative category for the literary works discussed, a critical explanation of how she perceives and uses the model would have been useful for general readers and would have enriched the analysis. Nonetheless, as a clear, thoughtful presentation of women writers who have been engaging protagonists in Italian literature and society, Amoia's book should be of broad interest. Furthermore, since several of the novels analyzed have been published in English translation, the study could be used effectively in undergraduate courses offered in Comparative Literature and Women's Studies, as well as in Italian Studies. In view of the popular international acclaim Oriana Fallaci has earned in the fields of journalism and literature for well over two decades, Oriana Fallaci: The Rhetoric of Freedom provides a longoverdue examination of her novels and reportage. In many respects, the book surpasses its aims as an exploratory study, designed to make "possible a serious consideration of . . . [Fallaci's] status as a writer." Reading against the prevailing current among literary critics who have dismissed Fallaci's writings, John Gatt-Rutter persuasively challenges their key charges. These include claims that Fallaci's interviews, reportage, and novels merely stage her self-exhibition, break the rules of literary style and genre, and represent a form of kitsch. Two fundamental critical notions, presented in chapter 1, along with an informative biographical profile of Fallaci's life and professional [End Page 464] itinerary, orient Gatt-Rutter's overall approach and assessment of the journalistic and literary texts. First of all, he reestablishes the crucial distinctions between the various figures of Fallaci fashioned in private life, in the public arena, through the authorial voice of her works, and, most importantly, in discursive constructions of Oriana Fallaci as character, the last of which is a central rhetorical element in the author's textual production. Although such distinctions might appear self-evident, critics tend to collapse them in Fallaci's case, thereby producing the terms of their critique. Second, working through a paradigm of rhetorical suasion indebted to concepts elaborated by Seymour Chatman and Ross Chambers, Gatt-Rutter evaluates each of Fallaci's works in terms of the interdependent forms of "aesthetic" and "ideological" suasion as related to such values as freedom, courage, and justice. While doing so, he raises a variety of nuanced questions concerning the contingent meanings of these values in Fallaci's representations of feminism, gender models, Vietnam, and Islamic fundamentalism, for instance. Focusing his discussions of Fallaci's journalistic writings on the texts published in book form, GattRutter first analyzes I sette peccati di Hollywood (1958), and identifies narrative and rhetorical features that also distinguish her later works. Among the most significant traits is the differentiation between the detached authorial voice and the first-person character of Oriana, which fulfills key rhetorical functions, and, as he demonstrates, signals part of the work's importance as a precursor to New Journalism, a "hybridization of reportage and fiction." Here, as in each of his readings, Gatt-Rutter situates Fallaci's text in relation to pertinent works in various national literatures as well as within the specific sociohistorical and cultural context of Italy. Though brief, the commentary on Il sesso inutile: Viaggio intorno alla donna (1961), a volume of travel essays documenting Fallaci's impressions of women's conditions in countries around the world, introduces problems associated with women's emancipation, feminism, and patriarchal constructions of sex-gender systems, which receive thorough, provocative analysis in chapters 4 and 5, respectively treating the novels Penelope alla guerra (1962) and Lettera a un bambino mai nato (1975). While providing meticulous examinations of Fallaci's linguistic and narrative techniques, Gatt-Rutter proposes that the plot of the former novel "signifies the paradox of freedom through the text's unfolding; freedom [End Page 465] amounts to the female subject's exclusion from relationship." Presenting the latter work as a paradigm of aesthetic and ideological suasion, the brilliant reading demonstrates the complexity of the rhetorical strategies and metaphorical web of meanings attached to the values of individual existence, love, and freedom. Significantly, the author tells us, the monologue addressed through the maternal body to the fictive child within negates "authoritarianism in the name of liberty," thereby managing "to negate

liberty itself, and presents motherhood as a contradiction." The potential permeability of boundaries between journalistic forms (the interview and reportage) and literature represents an overarching issue in the discussions of Gli antipatici (1963), Intervista con la storia (1974), Se il sole muore (1965), Quel giorno sulla luna (1970), and Niente e cos sia (1969), presented in chapters 6 through 8. More specifically, Gatt-Rutter situates these works in relation to debates about narrative, reportage, and the novel of fact, conducted by Egon Erwin Kisch, Georg Lukcs, and later, Tom Wolfe, while also exploring how the diverse speaking voices crafted by Fallaci and the power relations between them may articulate the rhetoric of freedom. Among the innovative arguments developed is the proposition that several discursive traits signal not kitsch, as some critics have contended, but a "deliberately demotic stylization," creating a popular or "folk" mode of expression. Shifting the focus to Un uomo (1979) and InsciAllah (1990), Gatt-Rutter examines the texts' specific narrative systems and how they relate to the faction novel. He proposes that the terms of representation and address in Fallaci's reconstruction of the events surrounding the apparent murder of Alekos Panagoulis articulate a politics of writing, conceived to promote freedom and justice, a position supported by an engaging analysis of the functions of the "apostrophe," the oral registers of discourse, and the Proppian paradigms of myth and hero, among other issues. The mingling of literary and reportage elements in Un uomo, he concludes, performs a "democratization" of the word, "making its power accessible to all." In contrast, similar strategies in InsciAllah, which highlight the indeterminacy between fiction and fact as Fallaci invents fictional characters whose stories unfold on the historical landscape of the war in Beirut, may actually exhibit traits of "authoritarian fiction." Gatt-Rutter employs Edward Said's notion of [End Page 466] orientalism in a salient critique of Fallaci's textual mapping of rationality onto the West and irrationality onto Islam. In this manner, he contends, the novel appears to oppose war, but "compounds the cause of war by positing evil in the Other, thus falling prey to the very charge of intolerance and irrationality which is imputed to that Other." As in the preceding chapters, GattRutter draws out the significance of differences between the original Italian text and the English translation. Also of special interest is the overview concluding the study, which clearly sets forth the ways close textual analysis of Fallaci's writings challenges central arguments upon which her marginalization in literary criticism rests. Engaging for its thought and prose, Gatt-Rutter's study constructs a productive critical perspective that proposes new areas of inquiry for scholars working in diverse disciplines. Robin Pickering-Iazzi University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

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