Bridging the ocean, thematic aspects of Italian literature of migration to Canada

grantor: University of TorontoThe aim of this thesis is to present an examination of texts forming the Italian literature of migration to Canada, a corpus of writings which comprehends narrative works by writers of Italian background, and in Italian language, but have never been analyzed as a self-contained body. All the authors came to Canada at least for a period in their lives, and have left a varied written record of their experiences in Canada, for the most part either in an autobiographical work or in texts of a more creative nature. Thanks to these texts we were able to observe in literary form the evolution of the Italian migration process to Canada from the l7th-century up to the present-time. Among the authors dealt with are Bressani, Moroni Parken, Duliani, Randaccio, Ardizzi, Rimanelli and Grohovaz. The investigation highlights those thematic aspects which most distinguish this production, showing both the continuity of inspiration and motifs as well as the diversity of approaches and genres. These narrative works can provide an important contribution to the comprehension of the mental, emotional and more intimate dimensions of the immigrant experience, and hence complement the store of historical and socio-scientific studies now readily at hand. The fundamental motif underlining this literature is the impossibility for the immigrant of disregarding the impact the discovery of the new world and of the 'other' had on one's psyche and the need to span the ocean of his or her inquietude by the act of writing. On the individual level, each of these works contributes to the immigrant writer's creation of a personal bridge which can join and unite the two shores of his or her experience, thus relieving angst and coherently merging old and new worlds, past and present, Italian background and Canadian experience. In the representation of the life of Italians in Canada these texts also acquire an important cultural function at the collective level, because they allow Italian-Canadians of all generations to recognize the continuity between their cultural past and their present life in Canada, as well as further a knowledge of the immigrant experience "from the inside."Ph.D