Author: Rosanna Turcinovich Giuricin

America is different, often there are no tools to understand our history. Trained in Milan, at the University of Philosophy with a particular interest in music and musical aesthetics but still I did not become a musicologist. For a few years I looked for some placement working in some publishing house and teaching, then in '89 the opportunity to leave for America with a competition of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for which I went to the USA as an Italian lecturer. What did America represent for you at that moment? It wasn't the first thing I had in mind, I would have preferred Germany for my interest in German literature and music, but America was the country of folk music which aroused a strong interest in me. It was the country of Bob Dylan – who I was passionate about and knew very well – and who for me was the key to understanding some things about American culture. Much later I studied it in depth and translated it until I published a book on Dylan that was published by Feltrinelli in 2001 for his sixtieth birthday and was then reprinted in 2011 with a revised edition. Why Dylan? The fascination began when I was 15, for his voice even before I understood what he was singing, it is a unique and multiple voice that embodies different possibilities of vocal expression but also American culture – a little white, a little gospel, a little Jewish, a little folk – and so in the melting pot that Dylan was in himself, he became a microcosm of the American world. In addition to the book, I translated the entire collection of his songs, 255 and more, again for Feltrinelli in 2006. What did you discover in these texts? A complexity that, in part, I already knew, then studying them and writing notes for the book I realized the very high cultural complexity sometimes conscious, sometimes not which does not matter for him he is instinctive, he is not an intellectual, someone who has read and absorbed a lot from the form of American music but also from American religiosity which is a complex and difficult subject but which is an obligatory path to understand America. A world that is harsh for a European, closer perhaps to a Swiss or German Calvinist. For those raised in Italian Catholicism, American religiosity is an abstruse concept. American religion is severe, one could define it as a religion of judgment, of compassion. Going to America I learned to think in a different way, not like an American even though I have lived there for 26 years but still not like an Italian. I went to America at 33, too late to become an American, you have to go there at 12, go to school. The schools there are there for just that: to become Americans. America is a melting pot of different people from all over the world who find common ground in which to recognize themselves, through school. Schools are micro-societies in which one learns to assert oneself, to gain respect, to manage oneself, not necessarily to become cultured - this is not considered the most important thing - but rather to integrate into a society. It extols individualism from kindergarten onwards. It is a fundamental element, individualism and a strong sense of national belonging. For us Italians it is difficult to understand, Italy is a reality of regions, provinces, municipalities that have grown independently from each other, often in contrast with the result that we feel closer to our region than to the concept of Italy. America, which should be a fragmented country due to its multicultural, multiracial reality, strongly recognizes itself in this national unity. There is no debate about this, or at least there was until the election of Obama who, being an African-American raised in Hawaii, while his father was not even born in America, let's say falls outside the typical history of an Orthodox American. The fact that he is in the White House has triggered a violent reaction from the old white ruling class of the South that has rebuilt, in recent years, a sort of virtual South that is the one that was defeated in the war of secession. However, today, if one looks at the geopolitical map of the United States, one sees that the states defeated in the secession have created an enclave that is identified as reactionary Republican, with a desire to go back in time, to rebuild the South of Gone with the Wind. Incomprehensible if it were not for Obama's presence. They may not be able to make this leap into the past but they still managed to split America in a way that had never been seen before. I tried to explain it in a book published in 2008 entitled “America at the Crossroads of Democracy” – born from a series of newspaper articles (Europe, of the Democratic Party) on the subject – in which I told from the southern point of view, where I live and I still live, not in the historical south but still in Texas, the changes and the enormous efforts made by the Americans also to elect Obama was not a joke and however also the backlash that came after. It's not in the book because it stops a month before the elections but I have since written many other articles that I hope to rework and publish to follow up on the considerations reported. What were the stages that led you to settle in Houston? Houston was my first place to work with the Italian Consulate and the University's Italian program, but the assignment I had with the ministry allowed for a transfer after three or four years, and clearly I wanted to see other realities, so four years later I went to Toronto. For three years I worked at McMaster University and with the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto. The assignment was renewed with a second competition and I went to New York where I stayed for seven years at NY University always working with a program of the Italian Cultural Institute for which I organized many cultural events, especially literary ones. I met Magris in Toronto where I had invited him to a series of readings that are held in Toronto regularly. We had written to each other before. Then we met again in NY where Tomizza also came. The ministry rules changed, so for my next assignment I had to decide whether to return to Italy or work full-time for the ministry. In the meantime I received a call from the University of Houston where I had started and where they offered me the direction of the Italian program. All this twelve years ago, since then this has been my constant commitment, director of the Italian program and of a master's degree – which I created with some colleagues – a Master's degree in world cultures and literatures. Understand what? In the meantime, it commits us professors to continuously study new things, never known before, in order to be able to teach what interests the students. The project is ambitious, to build from a base that starts from the linguistic base for courses on the history of culture, the history of ideas that seeks to cover the culture of globalization. So a continuous challenge… Of course, also because we have Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Latin American students, a few from Europe so I can't teach from a European point of view. Exactly, what does it mean to teach Italian in Houston? I do not teach the language, which is entrusted to my collaborators. Being a director, I deal with literature. Some Italian literature courses are held in English. Italian in Houston, what does it mean, you have to see who you teach it to, who the recipients are. Most of the students are of Hispanic culture, because they come from Central America or were born in America and speak Spanish, and then Anglo-Saxon students. Why they choose Italian The most banal thing is that speaking Spanish, expanding to Italian is easy to learn even if the two languages ​​have notable differences, much more than a distracted student can imagine when enrolling in Italian. But this is the first reason. Then there is the cultural aspect, for the Hispanic student the Italian culture is a support for them, that is, while the Anglo-Saxon culture is the one in which they are destined to live but it is the one that will always consider them a minority, until they become the majority in 2040 as was predicted but it is the culture with which they will have to clash, by which they will be judged that will give them a job, that will have to evaluate their abilities. Italy, no, will not have to do this, its culture is assimilated for pleasure, which is not felt as threatening or imperialistic towards them, Italy has never had colonies in the Hispanic world. So there is a certain ease in approaching this type of teaching? There is a certain willingness on the part of these students to assimilate, to learn something about a culture that they feel is “friendly”. While on the part of the student of Anglo-Saxon origin the motivations may be different, there may be a certain fascination for art or even for lifestyle, for fashion and cooking, banally. Are there also students who have Italian origins and therefore want to learn the language and culture? Yes, there are some, let's say they are one of the realities, that is, Hispanics, Italophiles and more kids of Italian origin. In Houston, as in all big cities, there are many Italians but they are scattered. The perception of Italy in America begins in Rome and ends in Florence, with a few Venetian moments, everything else doesn't exist, why? Well, if we start from a popular perception, not from that of scholars, not from those who really know Italy.  The popular one first considers Florence and Tuscany, because there are never ending books that tell about middle-aged women who come to Italy and rediscover life. And then Hollywood cinema also insisted a lot on this myth. So, first of all, Florence and Tuscany, then Rome because it is the capital, because it is the place of Audrey Hepburn's Roman holidays and then Venice, not even as part of Italy but already as Petrarch called it an Alter Mundus, Venice is Venice is not part of planet earth. In fact, in perception it is a unique thing. They rarely know the rest of Italy and rarely have the opportunity to go there because the typical Italian holiday has predestined and fixed destinations. When you address issues concerning Trieste at the university, Tomizza, what happens? Trieste and the area surrounding it are almost incomprehensible because you have to know its history which is very intricate and, since I also tried to teach a bit of these things, I saw that there are problems, because of the many things to keep in mind, both of European history and local history that Americans frankly cannot know, they barely know their own history, they study it very little at school, geography is almost never studied, it is almost absent from school programs. Why? Eh, why, I'd like to know that too. The American school system experienced its own '68, which was not a protest in the streets against the dominant educational models, but rather against the Vietnam War, but was also a pedagogical revolution, which transformed a teaching model that actually worked in an America stratified at class level, meaning that those who went to good schools were middle-class whites and blacks didn't go. Now, with racial integration, the weight of traditional education has disappeared, so the revolution has been brutal, in some ways: English grammar has stopped being taught, children learn to read and write but not the rules of grammar. So it is perfectly normal that an American, today in his thirties or forties, cannot explain the difference between an adverb and a verb because these are concepts that he does not even know because they have never been taught to him. A leveling down… Yes, absolutely but perhaps it was inevitable. Because it was necessary to bring in the masses of those who had always been excluded from education and who live in such different conditions that it is not possible to teach the same things to everyone. Having absorbed the effects of this phase, is the situation now evolving? Slowly, however, the revolution and this need for integration has led to a leveling of language teaching which has been replaced by the fact that the language must be learned naturally, not by rules which, if one lives in the context, are fine. But when it comes to teaching a foreign language, as we have to do with Italian, things get complicated. We need to teach them a little grammar, but they don't know that grammar, so when they have to understand that one word is a verb, another is an adjective, and another is an adverb, we need to explain the meaning of the words themselves, what verb, adjective, and adverb mean. And it's not enough to define them because these are things that are learned through practice, so it's a big difficulty. Then the study of geography was practically eliminated, the study of history is limited to the study of the history of the state in which they live with some general knowledge of the history of the United States, some very general knowledge of the history of the rest of the world. But isn't there a risk of forming citizens unaware of their place in the world? I don't want to give an overly negative impression. I'll try to explain why. These are things that would make a European's hair stand on end. You see the case of a student who one day almost got angry with me because I talked about Canada and I talked about Ottawa and she asked me: but how do you, who are Italian, know where Ottawa is, I don't know where Ottawa is, I don't even know what it is. I can't conceive how someone could have notions of this kind. Or I could tell you about the manager of an oil industry in Houston who goes to his Italian secretary, who told me about it and says: Miss, please look for India for me, I don't know where it is. But this is the norm, not the exception. So when I have to introduce the same concept of Italy I have to understand if they know where Europe is. I have met people who didn't know California was in the United States. And I'm not kidding. Or, I'll end with this, my sister comes to visit me, we go to a party and when someone asks her where she's from she says she's from Italy and a distinguished gentleman asks her if she came by car. Faced with all this, one wonders if the stereotype of Americans knowing nothing is true. It is not true because society is based on other criteria that are not ours, it is not based on the criterion of personal culture but on the culture of access. It is not important to have read two thousand books but that the library is open until midnight. If one wants to learn, one can do so; if one wants to live peacefully in ignorance, one can too. Ignorance in such a country is not a negative value, it is a personal choice that is respected. Of course it also has a social pacification function, the less people know the better it is for those in power. We must not forget that the downward leveling of American schools is not only due to the need to include that part of the population that has always been excluded from education but also to the decision around the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president, to weaken public schools as much as possible. This process went on without anyone being able to stop it. This exacerbated the problem. But for the white middle or upper middle class who hold the keys to power, this is fine because they send their children to private schools where the teaching is not that it is crazy better but it is a little better. Typically, with some rare exceptions, private schools have a curriculum that is perhaps more structured, intense, and requires a little more. And in any case, even those who realize the situation in which public schools find themselves today fear not the absence of a basic culture, that is not perceived as a problem, what is feared is that American children will lose, compared to the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, in their knowledge of mathematics and scientific subjects. I don't know or even discuss the humanities, they don't exist in the political debate, no one, not even Obama who has a background as a lawyer, as a humanist, will ever say on television, we must increase the study of the humanities, because he will lose votes if he says so, because there would be an immediate reaction. After that, math and science are difficult and not everyone can do it and in any case it takes an application that the Chinese who came to America with the spirit of the emigrant and with the determination of the emigrant, can easily beat the Americans. A phenomenon present everywhere, even in Italian schools immigrants are more motivated To get back to us, explaining Magris and our world what does it imply? This can only be done at high levels. Unless one decides to dedicate a whole year to telling the story of Trieste from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Second World War and the Treaty of Osimo and does only that, they will probably learn it in the end, but that is all one has to do. Years ago I wanted to teach a course on travel literature, including Danubio, but the students were absolutely unable to even go beyond page 10 due to the enormous amount of information that book contains: names, locations, authors, many of whom were unknown even in Europe. So, either one already has a passion for that cultural and geographical area and therefore continues even if one does not understand everything. But lacking passion and an idea of ​​what Central Europe is, what can we do? They are, in fact, destined to remain invisible realities. Blocked by a Nigerian student who grew up in Italy who, after the first three or four pages, says to me: but excuse me, does the author of this book assume that we have read all the books he has read? I had to say yes and that if someone hasn't read them, at least give them some credence and continue even without knowing the individual texts. This year we read something about the historical novel, I included this book by this collective of authors from Bologna called 54 and it is a story in which Trieste, Yugoslavia, have a great importance. A book certainly easier to read than Danube, certainly. I saw that they had considerable difficulty understanding all these border changes and especially the ideology. The hardest thing to explain to an American kid today is the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. He is completely unequipped to understand them: fascism, communism, anarchy, revolutionary socialism, the difference between Stalin and Tito, Tito's partisans, white and red Italians. How to do it, it is frighteningly complex for those who did not grow up in it and by now these are things that are too far away to realize, not for us who have experienced them but for anyone else it is like talking about the Trojan War, which is otherwise simple: Greeks, Trojans, the gods on one side and the gods on the other, it cannot be easier than that. In fact, Homer is taught and is popular, my Greek colleague who teaches epic poetry always has full classes, because it is easy to understand, while Italian epic poetry is not so easy, even the Risorgimento. Explain that it was done by people who basically hated each other, Mazzini, Garibaldi Cavour who couldn't stand each other and who did something badly anyway, halfway but they did it. It is clear that these things need to be explained at a level of complexity that presupposes highly motivated students, present who truly want to delve into the depths of a foreign culture. Can attachment to the flag help us understand the aberrations of nationalism? Burning the flag is an act of contempt but there is no crime of contempt, burning the flag is part of freedom of speech and therefore cannot be prosecuted legally. Clearly, American nationalism is not referable to nineteenth-century European nationalism, it is not linked to the concept of borders. It is based on the concept of exceptionalism that comes from some doctrine of one of the historical presidents: that is, America as an exceptional state, an exception in the entire world, on planet earth and as such must be preserved. They are an experiment, successful in their view because there are no equals in history except the time of the Mongol empire, of a very young nation that becomes the first in the world, outclassing England, China, the great powers including Russia, and it does not end immediately, that is, American pre-eminence is not like the horde of Jengin Khan, it has existed for more than a hundred years and shows no signs of weakening its role. In the wake of this exceptionalism by which they consider themselves different from others and therefore right, as can be seen from the facts, they consider themselves the most powerful. How can one reason about philosophy in the face of so much pragmatism? Americans, from this point of view, are like the ancient Romans, that is, they have a legal culture rather than a philosophical one. The Greeks were the philosophers, the Romans were the jurists, and America is passionate about legal issues. Trials are watched on television, cases are dissected down to the smallest detail for months on end, and they are what truly excites everyone. The legal education of American culture is dominant, making America a nation of lawyers. In American departments, they teach analytic, cognitive philosophy, that is, analysis of language or the brain's theory of knowledge. The whole range of what we consider practical philosophy, moral philosophy, cultural philosophy, which is what many philosophers do today, from the most theoretical to the most practical, this is taught in English language departments, in comparative literature or in some foreign language departments, rarely in philosophy departments. An example – and there are many others – in my university, in the philosophy department, as European philosophy we stop at Leibniz, Kant maybe. American philosophy has carved out its own path since the 1930s, it is no longer European, however since the weight of the American academy is still dominant, this model has been exported to Europe so that in Germany almost exclusively analytical philosophy is done, so in Italy in some departments this type of philosophy is done exclusively. Which means that the old conception of philosophy is destined to disappear. Michaelstadter is a Greek philosopher. In America there is only one book in English about him, written by a colleague. Persuasion and Rhetoric was also translated but had no response. It falls within the line that goes from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, a line of philosophical criticism of language and not analysis. In a certain sense, in philosophy departments, philosophy is not done at all; it is taken for granted that language exists but the application is studied by analyzing what is already given.  Everything else goes through the comparative literature departments. Today also Italian philosophers such as the Italians Vattimo, Esposito, Cacciari but always in the literature departments. That is, an enclave. The greatest satisfaction There are many, for example seeing a student of Mexican origin, from a rather poor family, who enters university and does not know a word of Italian, speaks Spanish and English, graduates with a double degree in Italian and Latin, becomes a Latin teacher but returns to university and enrolls in our master's degree and has now been accepted into the doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley, which is particularly difficult to get into. A great success for her but also a great satisfaction for our department. When I see that after two or three months of hard work in a literature or cinema course, which I teach more than anything else, I see that after the initial resistance, they give in because they can't resist or they become really passionate. With Dante the situation is different, the ground is already prepared. Those who come to attend a course on Dante already know him, know that he needs to be studied and are already prepared to be passionate about him. Maybe not with Antonioni. It takes a lot of conspiracy theory to get them excited, to make them understand that they have to concentrate, accept long takes, slow shots, learn to watch without the impatience of a fast-paced story. Any film made before ten years ago is too slow for American students anymore. For them, 70s films are unwatchable. Many students have never seen a black and white film, rarely with subtitles and then films from the forties and fifties if they saw them on TV they immediately changed the channel. When you happen to give conferences at Italian universities, what do you notice? That students are much more prepared, even in high schools. For me, teaching in Italy is a vacation, I can take some things for granted, which I can't afford in America. I feel a certain sadness in thinking that in Italy, where this level of preparation exists, society has no intention of inserting these people into the useful productive world, so culture remains a heritage of the personal sphere but never goes beyond the step to become the ruling class. A mix between the two realities, American and Italian, would be perfect… We should do something else, that is, conceive Italian history as it is ultimately in America. Let me start by saying that in America they are egalitarian up to a certain point, school serves to select the ruling class, and there are tools to do so, a case in point being Obama. It is true that his mother was an anthropologist, therefore a cultured person, but he was orphaned relatively young and also poor. Through a series of selection mechanisms he managed to enter the two major American universities, Columbia and then Harvard, where he managed to assert himself. Then he does social work and from there he moves into politics. With this selection he was already directed. The moment he enters politics and makes himself known within the Democratic Party, he is immediately selected as a possible leader. At that time, no one was thinking about the role of president, but he was identified, that is, those in the party knew that he was a promising person and they left him space. It is through these selection mechanisms that start from the school and pass through other mechanisms that the ruling class is created. All this does not happen in Italy, meritocracy does not produce effects and this is the big difference, there is no co-optation by wealth or excellent knowledge. Or in any case these are rare cases, the rule is different. But is it true that people walk around with guns in Houston? I get asked this often. As far as I'm concerned, the answer is no, I don't carry a gun. But this too is a very American characteristic: the passion for weapons, as difficult to explain as their religiosity. You have to enter an area of ​​the human psyche where one would not want to dwell too much. It's very difficult to understand. But it must be said, in America there are more guns than people. If people weren't so disciplined, America would be a bloodbath from morning till night. In reality, not much is happening when compared to the number of guns in circulation that suggest a violent society. However, the victims are not few, 30.000 a year, the weapons are more than three hundred million. Which suggests that owning a gun is something almost banal, an object that is given by a father to his son to finally make him feel like a man, free to own a gun according to the second article of the American constitution, as important as freedom of speech. Indeed, it is believed that they are related, that is, that without the freedom to own a gun there would not even be freedom of speech, it would be a dictatorship. One of the teachings, however, is also their extreme discipline. Plato, Aristotle, and European history have taught America a social discipline that is sometimes disconcerting because it ends up coinciding with the acceptance of working conditions and so on. But this discipline is founded on the doctrine of freedom and personal responsibility. When I talk about these things they tell me that I have become an American, but the first thing you notice when looking at the Italian news is the total absence of personal responsibility on the part of our ruling class. I do not directly blame the current ruling class because it is a problem that in my opinion lies in the fact that in Italy there have been large institutions that, by their statute, undermined personal responsibility, that is to say the Catholic Church or the political parties. As they were born, they are machines for the weakening of personal responsibility. The very fact that it was once said as if it were a value, I vote for the party, not for the man, was a way of saying I believe in impersonal forces, superior to each of us, and therefore none of us will ever be responsible for what these impersonal forces will do, the responsibility will be historical and certainly not individual. Since the idea of ​​history moved by these great masses does not exist in America, everything falls on the individual who at any moment can be judged, perhaps not criminally but by society and can be excluded from it. This is why an American politician, the moment he is implicated in a scandal, regardless of whether he is innocent or guilty, resigns. After that we'll see, maybe he'll return to the scene because he was declared innocent, and his return is still possible, whether it's at the time of the Scarlet Letter or the Salem witches.