This panel examines how literature circulates beyond fixed ethnic identity by bringing together the work of John Fante and Charles Bukowski as a case study in Italian American literary afterlives. While Fante is firmly situated within Italian American literary studies and Bukowski is more often framed within postwar American counterculture, this panel argues that reading them relationally reveals how Italian American literary aesthetics travel, mutate, and endure beyond explicitly ethnic frameworks.

Anchored in Los Angeles, the panel foregrounds the city as both material environment and symbolic engine of marginality. Los Angeles emerges as a space of exclusion, aspiration, and cultural excess where literary identities are forged through precarity, labor, failure, gender norms, and the persistent myth of the American Dream. In this context, Italian American identity functions less as overt theme than as aesthetic residue—embedded in narrative posture, tone, voice, and modes of address that circulate outward into a broader Americana.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Los Angeles as a literary space of Italian American marginality and cultural production
• Italian American literary circulation beyond fixed ethnic identity
• Fante and Bukowski as connected figures within a shared Los Angeles literary ecology
• Working-class realism, failure, and the myth of the American Dream
• Ethnicity as aesthetic residue rather than explicit theme
• Masculinity, labor, and bodily excess in Italian American–inflected Americana
• Influence, inheritance, and post-ethnic literary afterlives
• Canon formation and the reassessment of Italian American literary impact
• Urban marginality and outsider authorship in Los Angeles writing
• Reframing Italian American literature through circulation, transmission, and endurance

By situating Fante and Bukowski within a shared literary ecology, the panel rethinks Italian American literature not as a closed ethnic tradition but as a generative source whose forms and sensibilities persist through influence, inheritance, and post-ethnic transmission. This approach invites a reassessment of canon formation, challenging models that tether Italian American writing solely to authenticity or explicit ethnic content. Instead, the panel emphasizes literary circulation, afterlife, and endurance across cultural boundaries. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, including Italian American studies, American literary studies, urban studies, cultural history, reception theory, and aberrant decoding. Papers may draw on close reading, archival research, or theoretical interventions that explore how Italian American literature shapes—and is reshaped by—Los Angeles as a cultural and literary system.

Submission guidelines:

Please submit a 250-300-word paper abstract along with five keywords and a 250-word bio to Anthony Dion Mitzel, anthonydion.mitzel@unibo.it, and Alan Hartman, ahartman@mercy.edu, by March 20, 2026. This is a non-guaranteed LLC Italian American Forum Session. Papers not accepted will be considered for a waitlist.