The HVCC READS Committee is excited to announce that Joseph Luzzi will visit campus on Friday, March 27 to talk about his book, My Two Italies.
During that day, Luzzi will visit two classes, share lunch with a small group of students, faculty, and employees, and deliver a lecture to the entire campus community with a dessert reception to follow. The lecture will take place in the Maureen Stapleton Theatre in the Campus Center at 1 p.m. with the reception to follow right outside the theatre.
Luzzi, like many American-born children of immigrants, has written a memoir about his life and his position between two cultures: the pure Italian culture of his parents and older siblings, who came to America in 1956, and the Italian-American culture he experienced as a native American, born and raised in Westerly, Rhode Island.
Luzzi currently works as the director of Italian Studies at Bard College In an interview with BookPage, he says that rather than describing himself as an “Italian-American,” he is Italian “and” American. He adds, “I was too much of a child of my Calabrian parents to fit in with the kids in the cafeteria, yet too attuned to the English language and the American games and sports of my classmates to be as authentically ‘Italian’ as the Calabrian branch of my family.”
In addition to his personal struggle with his “Two Italies,” Luzzi’s work also discusses the two different regions of his parents’ homeland, regions that the New York Times Book Review describes as “the prosperous north versus the indigent south.” Since Luzzi’s family immigrated from the southern region and since he still has family there, one would think that he might identify with that region. In reality, though, as a scholar of Italian arts, he is much more interested in the northern region, and he is perplexed by the fact that Italy doesn’t appear to be unified. Luzzi will discuss both his book and his heritage during his visit.
The idea behind the HVCC READS program is twofold: first, bringing an author to campus for a discussion of his or her work will remind readers that living, breathing individuals are the creators of the books that form the foundation of a well rounded education; and, second, when everyone at HVCC reads the same book, the entire campus becomes a classroom for a discussion of ideas. In the past, authors such as William Kennedy, Richard Selzer, Bill McKibben, and Jessica Abel, among others, have participated.
For more information about Luzzi’s visit or about the HVCC READS program, contact Jim LaBate at j.labate@hvcc.edu.
Published: Thu, 19 Feb 2015 16:42:24 +0000 by j.labate