On the Edges: Influences, Encounters, Relations, and Conviviality

The essays gathered in this special issue pay tribute to Rebecca West and her four decades-long career in Italian Studies. Two award-winning studies plot prime coordinates in our esteemed colleague’s oeuvre and describe the interdisciplinary essays and reflections collected here in her honor. Both her first monograph, Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge (West 1981, winner of the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association), and Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (West 2000, winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Manuscript Prize), illustrate an exquisite sensibility to the literary text, whether in poetic or narrative form. The more than one hundred essays, translations, and book chapters that our colleague authored shine light on varied subjects rooting in and touching on broad vectors within Italian literary and cultural studies, including cinema and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnic and comparative studies. Withal, they compose what the contributors and I call the West Fest.

Historically, a Festschrift, sometimes known as a libor amicorum, is a collection of essays written in honor of a scholar following a lengthy, productive career. Very technically, it is meant to be offered to the honoree “in vita,” and often attaches to a significant occasion, sometimes retirement, but also possibly a birthday or anniversary.¹ The first Festschriften, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory informs us, appear in the mid-nineteenth century and were dedicated to eminent colleagues’ career-long efforts and outputs in philosophy and history. In Italy, a Festschrift tends to be designated as a “Miscellanea commemorativa,” or something close to that. Without question, one could write volumes about the differences between the “Teutonic” and “Italic” denotations, but, to be sure, one of the most useful things about the term “Miscellanea” is the elasticity of concept that it invites (and/or celebrates). In this special issue, elasticity has served as an important precept, since it has allowed colleagues to sculpt briefer than usual essays that could all be accommodated in a single issue.

Whatever the tenor of publication, however, or its intent, what is certain is that a Festschrift represents an affective investment for all parties, so much so that one might call it the intellectual labor of love, or intellectuals’ labors of love, or labor of intellectual love. These affiliative networks of scholars and thought reach out across space; academic institutions, typologies, and locations; and across generations. They can hold up a mirror to our field, and in so doing pay tribute to the places we have come from and the (intellectual) distances we have traversed. Festschrift essays make contributions to specific subfields, but of a similar moment is their context (and paratext). The contents, the contributors, the tabulae congratulatoriae all help construct the transmission of knowledge in our field, institutional locations, influence, affluence, and affect.

Sitting down to my task as an editor, I immediately confronted a problem that in some ways is central to the period of time that our admired colleague’s work inscribes in Italian Studies, the late 1960s to the present. As I edited and wrote, should I adopt the gender-neutral, generationally-ordained method of referring to our colleague by her last name? To refer to her as “West” throughout may satisfy certain exigencies (to curb the overly familiar, especially in a special issue, and especially in a Festschrift), but it fails on other fronts (it is chilly, it may over-emphasize a kind of neutered neutrality, since it is typically in one’s name, not surname, that gender binaries manifest or are inscribed and reinscribed). On the other hand, if I refer to her as “Rebecca,” it may rankle feminists, especially those d’une certaine age, like those “wintering” women of the Seicento that Victoria Kirkham discusses in the essay she has contributed to this effort, or those of us for whom a surname-only reference conferred a previously absent sense of equity. Will my calling her “Rebecca,” then, diminish her gravitas and the respectful intention, especially in view of the relatively low number of Miscellanee written in honor of female colleagues? How will these choices be viewed in the varied national contexts in which the essays will be read? As an editor, I have chiefly encouraged colleagues to make their choices, with a few editorial recommendations along with my insistence that they keep their essays on the brief side. I have wondered what scholars will think in future, should they wish to cite from one of the essays, and find that the citation refers to our colleague by her first name. We are all familiar with the power of naming, or of not naming, of excluding, of letting dwindle on the edges when the edges are not celebrated, something that, in part, Keala Jewell’s essay on the poetics of Biancamaria Frabotta explores. Shall I call her by her entire name, Rebecca West? A mouthful. Or shall I use her initials –RJ West, in what I would call a largely Commonwealth (and therefore a little uneasy) convention? Should references instead be to Professor West or, as was customary at the University of Chicago, where she taught for her entire career, to “Ms West”? I will interpolate all these terms from here on as a way to cover bases, but also to focus our attention to this social construct and some of its consequences.

Historicizing Rebecca West’s oeuvre helps us map the changes that Italian Studies, as a field, has made over a forty-year period. As such, we can see how it forges a link to recent efforts of the journal’s new editorial leadership (Fabbri and McGlazer 2019). As we map West’s scholarly production, we can capture the moves, for example, from “Italianistica” to “Italian Studies,” from literary studies to screen studies, from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies, from Italian Studies to Italophone and Italian American Studies. As Anthony Tamburri and Fred Gardaphé clarify in their reflections, our honoree was the first colleague at a Research 1 (R1) institution in North America to bridge these fields as an Italianist, to help configure Italian American Studies transatlantically, and to help legitimate and position the vein of inquiry. This is the view that Giaime Alonge, in his essay here on censorship and Howard Hawkes’ Scarface (1932), takes when meticulously piecing together the para-cinematic archive in an effort to get at the filmic representation of Italian ethnicity in the 1930s. In her essay on the transatlantic view of Italian cultural production and its influence on Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Marguerite Waller points to RJ West’s efforts at drawing into proximity different academic fields within the academy (Italian Studies and Latin American Studies) so as to be able to ask important questions about influences, artistic expression, and the origins of creativity. Rather than some simple equivalency, these are “imperfect relations,” as in the title Waller has given to her essay. We were all profoundly saddened by the loss of our colleague Margie toward the end of our editorial process and are grateful for the chance to publish this essay, albeit posthumously. Franco Nasi helps encourage and call attention to the reverse flow of the transatlantic current in his contribution examining Gianni Celati’s translations of Mark Twain and Jack London.

Rebecca West’s scholarly trajectory bridged once-discrete academic disciplines, bringing them into, as Sarah Patricia Hill observes in her essay of the same title, “convivial encounter.” En route to an examination of the relation of word and image within West’s critical oeuvre and especially Celati’s relationship to photographer Luigi Ghirri, Hill pauses first to ruminate about a number of encounters configuring around Rebecca West. In essence, this is what Beatrice Collina, in her contribution, explores in her reflection on the contours of friendship among women and among colleagues, and among women who are colleagues, itself a topic that must be considered within its historical framework since it was not until the 1980s, in North America, that one could consider a critical mass of women scholars.

Some of the most important steps in the itinerary of West’s career as a scholar have been those taken with living writers. It was thanks in part to friendship and close colleagueship with Maria Corti, one of her very few senior women colleagues, that Rebecca West was able to have “convivial encounters” with a number of living writers, like, for example, Celati, but also Luigi Malerba and Giorgio Manganelli. Rebecca West’s embrace of the edges where sometimes edgy contemporary writers ringed gave rise to her numerous examinations of the non-canonical (or not yet canonized) works of contemporary writers, and Marie Orton’s essay here on the role of humor and subversion in the work of Laila Wajda speaks to this side of West’s scholarly curiosity and inclination.

Her undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh and study with Tibor Wlassics introduced Rebecca to her first love, the study of poetry, something celebrated in these pages by Keala Jewell’s essay as well as Anna Maria Torriglia’s, which explores the poetic production of Antonia Pozzi. That these two essays should center on women poets fashions a lovely, if late, correction to West’s time at Yale when, as a graduate student, she proposed Elsa Morante as the subject of her dissertation. After being steered away from the subject (for a perceived lack of gravitas, she feared, a hallmark of the age if ever there was one), she turned her focus to Montale, whose poetry would be the subject of her first, award-winning monograph. In their reflections here on their own shared conviviality with our honoree, both Rachel Jacoff and Millicent Marcus describe the Yale Years, adding much-needed archival memory of what it meant to be a (non-native Italian-speaking) woman training in and studying foreign national literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Following Yale, Rebecca headed for the University of Chicago, not so much “where fun goes to die” (the complaint of the faithless) as “where the intellect goes to thrive,” to blossom, and to flourish. Crescat scientia; vita excolatur. Thanks to the flexibility (there it is again) of the University, and especially of her colleagues in Romance Languages, West was encouraged to follow her curiosity where it led her. Some of this curiosity is chronicled in Paolo Cherchi and Elissa Weaver’s reflection on decades spent working alongside their colleague in Wieboldt Hall. And the openness of inquiry, the gameness, the non-doctrinaire approach to texts of all kinds is something Michael Subialka observes in his reflection on Rebecca’s contributions as a teacher.

In her reflection, Rachel Jacoff mentions RW’s focus on Montale’s use of double-l (“ll”) words in his renowned poem “L’Anguilla”/”The Eel” and how these words link to other vital syntagms in his poetics and beyond: scintilla, gemella, brillare, sorella. What a spectacularly spot-on semantic field that observation yields for a collection of essays honoring Rebecca West’s career in Italian Studies, stretched over four decades.

Sparkling, brilliant sister, we pay you tribute with these writings.

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Notes on contributors

Ellen Nerenberg

Ellen Nerenberg is Hollis Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Wesleyan University. She is author of Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (University of Toronto Press, 2001), winner of the Modern Language Association's Howard R. Marraro Prize, and Murder Made in Italy: Homicide, Media and Contemporary Italian Culture (Indiana University Press, 2012). She is co-editor and translator, with Nicoletta Marini Maio and Thomas Simpson, of Marco Baliani's Body of State, A Nation Divided (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2011). Her current book project, with Nicoletta Marini Maio, is Winx Nation: Educare la futura consumista (forthcoming, Rubbettino). She is co-editor of the Italian Studies Channel on the New Books Network, https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/peoples-places/italian-studies/, associate editor of g/s/i—gender/sexuality/Italy and president of the American Association for Italian Studies.

Notes

1 The germ of the West Fest was sowed at the 2013 conference, held at the University of Chicago on the occasion of Rebecca’s retirement. Special thanks to colleagues at the University for organizing the event.