From Wiseguys to Whiteguys: The Italian American Gangster, Whiteness, and Modernity in Don DeLillo's Underworld and Frank Lentricchia's The Music of the Inferno

Few tropes, if any, succeed in unveiling the interplay of the development of modern capitalism and the hegemonic place of whiteness in our culture as the Italian American gangster does. Mario Puzo's and Francis Ford Coppola's the Godfather is the figure that embodies this interplay. As suc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critique - Bolingbroke Society 2016-05, Vol.57 (3), p.254-267
Main Author: Pardini, Samuele F. S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American literature
Assimilation
Capitalism
Culture
DeLillo, Don
historical memory
Ideology
Italian American gangster
Italian Americans
Lentricchia, Frank
Literary criticism
modernity
Music
Narrative theme
Novels
Organized crime
Rhetorical figures
Text analysis
whiteness
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Summary:Few tropes, if any, succeed in unveiling the interplay of the development of modern capitalism and the hegemonic place of whiteness in our culture as the Italian American gangster does. Mario Puzo's and Francis Ford Coppola's the Godfather is the figure that embodies this interplay. As such, it provides the starting point for the reinvention of the Italian American gangster that Don DeLillo and Frank Lentricchia achieve in Underworld and The Music of the Inferno, respectively. These Italian American writers create versions of the Italian American gangster that decompose the historical unfolding of modernity in America and its ideological corollary, the success story of assimilation. Historical memory is the tool that DeLillo and Lentricchia share to undermine the mainstream narrative of assimilation. The contextualized close reading of Underworld and The Music of the Inferno that I conduct presents these novels as post-Godfather literary elaborations of the above-mentioned interplay and its inversion.
ISSN:0011-1619
1939-9138
DOI:10.1080/00111619.2015.1048633