Description
Book SynopsisThe two editors and eighteen scholars and creative nonfiction writers offer a lucid view of a writer who has produced one of the most provocative bodies of memoir writing in contemporary US literature, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: “Habit of Mind” 1
Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta
Memoir
Louise DeSalvo’s “Even in Death, La Bella Figura”: A Meditation on Honor, Respect, and the Silences That Bind 37
Margaux Fragoso
The Poetics of Trauma: Intertextuality, Rhythm, and Concision in Vertigo and Writing as a Way of Healing 50
Peter Covino
Fixing and Fictioning: Memory and Catholicism in Vertigo 62
Jeana Delrosso
Portrait of the Mother as a Writer and Researcher 75
Julija Sukys
Louise DeSalvo: Essaying Memoir 86
Joshua Fausty
Teaching
On Vulnerability and Risk: Learning to Write and Teach Memoir as a Student of Louise DeSalvo 105
Kym Ragusa
Fixing Things: What Louise DeSalvo Has Taught Me about Writing 111
Emily Bernard
Dark Whiteness and Literacy without Assimilation: DeSalvo’s Unlikely Narrative 117
Kimberly A. Costino
Mixing Bowl: On Crazy in the Kitchen, DeSalvo in the Classroom, and the Day I Got into Hunter 130
Lia Ottaviano
Furthering the Voyage: Reconsidering DeSalvo in Contemporary Woolf Studies 140
Benjamin D. Hagen
Culture
The Context of Louise DeSalvo’s Impact: Incest in Virginia Woolf’s Biography 155
Mark Hussey
“Thirty- seven Is the Unraveling Time” and Other Fictions of Fidelity in the Works of Louise DeSalvo 169
Jenn Brandt
Life Online: Skating and Breaking the Surface of the Self 179
Amy Jo Burns
The Fruits of Her Labor: Louise DeSalvo’s Memoirs of Food and Family 189
Mary Jo Bona and Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger
Mapping the Female Ethnic Self in the Family Battleground: Vertigo and the Greek American Novel 210
Theodora Patrona
DeSalvo’s Rialto: On Moving as a Livable Bridge 222
Ilaria Serra
The Knife and the Bread, the Brutal and the Sacred: Louise DeSalvo at the Family Table 233
John Gennari
Afterword. Crazy in the Study: Trying to Claim a Tradition in Louise DeSalvo’s Accented Writing 251
Anthony Julian Tamburri
List of Contributors 261
Index 265
