Publications of Thomas J Ferraro    :chronological  combined  bibtex listing:

Books

  1. Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America (May, 2005), New York UP (Winner, 2006 American Book Award. Choice, Recommended Book..)  [abs]
  2. Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (1993), U of Chicago P (Chapter I, "Blood in the Marketplace," was originally invited for Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity [Oxford UP, 1986], and has been reprinted in reference works on Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. The introduction is to be similarly reprinted in August 2008..)

Edited

  1. Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (1997), Duke UP  [abs]

Essays/Articles/Chapters in Books

  1. Cultural Studies Between Heaven and Earth, in A Catholic Studies Reader, edited by James T. Fisher and Maureen M. McGuinness (2011), pp. 35 ms. pages, Fordham University Press  [abs] [author's comments]
  2. Between Women; or, On Our Knees to Don Corleone, edited by Christian Messenger and JoAnne Ruvoli Gruba, VIA, vol. 19 no. 2 (2008--delayed release), pp. 1-20 (released summer 2009.)  [abs] [author's comments]
  3. Boys to Men (Salvific Masculinity in /Angels with Dirty Faces/), in Catholics in the Movies, edited by Colleen McDannell (2008), pp. 59-82, Oxford University Press  [abs] [author's comments]
  4. Cultural Studies Between Heaven and Earth: Beyond the Puritan Pedagogy of /The Scarlet Letter/, in American Catholic Studies, edited by James T. Fisher and Maureen McGuinness (under editorial review: 2010?), Fordham University Press  [abs]
  5. Cultural Studies Between Heaven and Earth (2006) (This is an expanded address for the North American Religions Section of the AAR, 2005, taking the work of Robert A. Orsi as a point of departure for querying the religious underpinnings of American Literary Studies, writ large; forthcoming in a volume on U.S. Catholic Studies, ed. James T. Fisher..)
  6. Contribution to MLA Roundtable in honor of AL at Seventy-Five, American Literature, vol. 77 (September, 2005), pp. 634-36
  7. Of 'Lascivious Mysticism' and Other Hibernian Matters, U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 23 no. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 1-17
  8. Lorenzo's Chrism, SAQ, vol. 103 no. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 235-63
  9. Italian-American Literature, in Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by Jay Parini, vol. 2 (February, 2004), pp. 275-284, Oxford UP
  10. Urbane Villager, in Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture, edited by Stanislao Pugliese (forthcoming), Palgrave MacMillan
  11. 'At Long Last Love'; or, Literary History in the Key of Difference, ALH [American Literary History], vol. 15 no. 1 (2003), pp. 78-86
  12. Giancarlo and the Border Patrol, in (In)Visible Cities: From the Postmodern Metropolis to the Cities of the Future, edited by P. D'Acierno, J. Ockman, and R. Sargent (forthcoming), Monacelli Press
  13. Italian Americans, in Scribner's Encyclopedia of US Intellectual and Cultural History, edited by Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams (2001), pp. 363-73
  14. 'My Way' in 'Our America': Ethnicity, Art, Profession, ALH, History in the Making Symposium Issue, vol. 12 (Fall, 2000), pp. 499-522  [author's comments]
  15. Response to Breitwieser, ALH, vol. 12 no. Fall 2000 (Fall, 2000), pp. 382-385
  16. Catholic Ethnicity and the Modern American Arts, in The Italian American Heritage, edited by Pellegrino D'Acierno (1999), pp. 331-352, Garland
  17. Catholic Ethnicity and the Modern American Arts, in The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to the Arts, edited by P. D'Acierno (1998), pp. 331-352, Garland
  18. The Souls of Catholic Folk: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, in American and European National Identities: Faces in the Mirror, edited by Stephen Fender (1996), pp. 73-87, Keele UP, UK
  19. Catholic Writers, in The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin (1995), pp. 155-57, New York: Oxford University
  20. Celine's American Genealogy, edited by Alica Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, SAQ, vol. 93 (Spring, 1994), pp. 507-11
  21. Mario Puzo, in The Reference Guide to American Literature, 3d ed. (1994), St. James Press  [author's comments]
  22. Ethnicity and the Literary Marketplace, in The Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Ellitt et al. (1991), pp. 380-406, Columbia UP
  23. Whole Families Shopping at Night!, in New Essays on White Noise, edited by Frank Lentricchia (1991), Cambridge UP (15-38.)  [author's comments]
  24. 'Working Ourselves Up': Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, SAQ, vol. 89 (Summer, 1990), pp. 547-582
  25. Avant-Garde Ethnics, in The Future of Modernism, edited by William Boelhower (1990), pp. 1-31, Free UP of Amsterdam
  26. Blood in the Marketplace: The Business of Family in the Godfather Narratives, in The Invention of Ethnicity, edited by Werner Sollars (1989), pp. 176-207, Oxford UP

Book Reviews

  1. Sopranos on the Couch (2003)
  2. Review of Beyond The Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, edited by A. Kenneth Ciongoli and J. Parini, Italian-Americana (Jan. 2002)
  3. Review of Jenny Franchot's Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, American Literature (Mar. 1995), pp. 148-50
  4. Review of Bonnie TuSmith's All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures, American Literature, vol. 66 (June, 1994), pp. 407-8
  5. Review of RSA: Rivista di Studi Nord-Americani, ItalianAmericana, vol. 10 (Fall/Winter 1991), pp. 91-3

Other

  1. At Long Last Love; or, Literary History in the Key of Difference, in ALH, edited by Eric Sundquist (Spring, 2003)  [abs] [author's comments]
  2. Transgression & Redemption  (There is a different kind of book calling to me that informs the survey courses I teach and that makes itself increasingly explicit in special-interest seminars and a new lecture course, "Transgression & Redemption." This book would render a synthesizing account of the interplay among radical self-transformation, violative love, and redemptive sacrifice in the U.S. literary and cultural imagination at least since the 1890s. Of course I would take advantage of the hugely expanded novelistic canon since postwar consensus but also-- since I intend full-bore engagement with some of the monsters of the older canon--the different reservoirs of knowledge, criteria of evidence, modes of argumentation, and constellations of value these expansions have entailed. I mean our hard-won sophistication in gender and sexuality, beginning with Eve Sedgwick's seminal reading of Billy Budd (and my dissent from Jenny Franchot's reading of The Scarlet Letter); the racialized and ethnic histories of migration, mobility, border-shifts, and diaspora, which are now paramount to U.S. literary studies; the newly emergent interrogation of secularized sacramentality (especially Jewish-Christian-Muslim syncretisms); and, finally, the re- vitalization of sensorially based understanding that comes from immersion in visual, musical, and performing arts, including the sentimental traditions of Hollywood and tin-pan alley once condemned as America's feminization. I realize that synthesis on this scale sounds at once old- fashioned and utopian, but my heroes are Melville and Cather, Dickinson and Stevens, Armstrong and Ellington--all of whom kept working at what they loved until the day they died..)
  3. Stella's Atlantic  (My research into painter and prose-poet Joseph Stella for Feeling Italian cries out for a full-length treatment, Stella's Atlantic, organized as a tightly linked set of scenes of revisionist instruction concerning the interplay, 1906-1926, among modernist urbanity, religious syncretism, and multilingual (trans)national dislocation.)
  4. The Art of Suspicion  (In The Art of Suspicion, currently incarnated as a graduate course, I foreground narratives, primarily American, that, in one way or another, seem to have marshalled all the queen's men of Foucauldian suspicion--the sharp, sharp skepticisms of our material-feminist, psychoanalycis, gender-bending, power-sensitive age--as a writerly form of devil's advocacy. What intrigues me is not so much the grounding of faith in radical doubt, as Enlightenment theologians would have it, but rather the erotics of demystification, the subliminity of overdetermination, and the provocation to ultimate indeterminacy--from Billy Budd and Passing's "it takes one to know one" to the multivalence of cultural capital in "our nativist modernists" (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, et al.) and from the freedom-within-paranoia of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel and The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, dir.) to the electric reciprocities of (dis)trust-and-surprise in Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy and The Stuntman (dir., Richard Rush).)