Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Abstract

To the sorrow of friends and colleagues in diverse academic communities around the globe, Carol Lazzaro-Weis, professor emerita of French and Italian at the University of Missouri, passed away February 26, 2022, in Columbia, Missouri. Carol is survived by her partner George Simpson, son Peter J. Weis, sister Joyce A. Lazzaro, and brother Gerald A. Lazzaro.Born in Philadelphia in 1949, Carol pursued a richly varied intellectual itinerary in terms of her academic training, the institutions of higher learning that she served, and the fields of expertise she developed as an engaged educator and scholar. Building upon her foundational education in French studies, with a bachelor's completed at Pennsylvania State University and a master's at Villanova University, Carol undertook subsequent graduate work in Romance studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a second master's in 1974, and her PhD in 1978. Her doctoral studies focused on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture as the major field of concentration, and on contemporary Italian literature, literary theory, and criticism as minor areas of concentration.During the early years of her academic career, Carol's teaching positions enabled her to live in places as diverse as France, Germany, and then Baton Rouge, where she taught courses in the French and German programs at Southern University from 1984 to 1988. While at Southern University, Carol's scholarly publications in French and Italian studies earned her promotions to associate professor of Romance languages and soon after to professor in 1993, when she also began serving as chair of the Department of Romance Languages, a demanding position that she held for some nine years. In 2002, Carol embarked upon a new phase of professional development as professor of French and Italian in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where she expanded her research and teaching interests in such areas as Francophone literature of Canada and the Caribbean, race and the Enlightenment, and postcolonial studies. She served as an affiliated faculty member in the Black Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Canadian Studies programs, as well as the Afro-Romance Institute. Carol held the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professorship from 2011 to 2015, the year in which she retired. Thereafter, she continued to fulfill formative roles in Italian studies, presenting her research at conferences organized by the AATI and AAIS, and writing a new book-length study, which was tentatively titled In Search of History: Women Writers of Historical Fiction in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature.Among the many strong, creative voices that have shaped the debates, directions, and interdisciplinary designs of Italian studies, Carol's voice has been distinct, expressing an acuity and rigor of thought surpassed only by her intellectual generosity, whether in her numerous invited lectures and scholarly papers delivered at conferences, or in her published works. These features, along with a comparatist approach putting diverse texts into dialogic relation, inflect her provocative analyses of archetypal figures and myths, theories pertaining to gender and difference, and notions of genre, as illustrated by her publications. Among these are her first book, Confused Epiphanies: L'Abbé Prévost and the Romance Tradition (1991), which traces the fluid forms and conventions of the romance back to Greek and Roman narratives, thus providing an interpretative frame for close readings of Prévost's writings as well as French and Italian works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; articles such as “The Subject's Seduction: The Experience of Don Juan in Italian Feminist Fictions” (1989), “The Female ‘Bildungsroman’: Calling It into Question” (1990), and “The Concept of Difference in Italian Feminist Thought: Mothers, Daughters, Heretics” (2002).Moreover, these features are hallmarks of Carol's work that earned her international recognition with the publication of From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women's Writing, 1968–1990. Groundbreaking when it came out in 1993, this study remains fundamentally significant today for understanding the ongoing debates about and relationships between French, Anglo-American, and Italian feminisms and how they bear upon the formal literary structures, conventions, and thematics crafted by contemporary women authors in Italy. The meticulous analysis of theories of and relations between gender and genre articulates an inherent boldness, especially when situated in the historical context of its production. From my partial perspective as a professor of Italian and Comparative Literature whose work dates back to 1985, the 1980s and early 1990s were marked by thrilling waves of theoretical propositions and debates about gender and its construction, subjectivity, the female symbolic, affidamento, equality, and difference, elaborated in public talks, position papers, articles, and books, with varying degrees of intellectual allure. Set against a seemingly constant invention of new terms of critical theory, the proposition of working through genre to examine feminist issues and women's writing was extraordinary. As Carol states at the outset of her study, genre had been suspiciously regarded as a “traditionally male domain” constituted by canonical works written by men and safeguarded by male literary critics. Therefore, as she tells us, “We need a theory of genre that starts by validating women's writings in reference to works by other women and, at the same time, does not assume the separation from or innate oppositionality of women's writing to literary conventions” (19). In the process of examining literary works by some twenty-five women authors in genres that include the confession, romance, Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the giallo, Carol elaborates an innovative theory of genre that highlights changing structural components and conventions of generic forms and how they are strategically manipulated, refashioned, or subverted by the writers in question as they engage with feminist themes and concerns.This notable contribution to genre theory has perhaps been eclipsed by Carol's brilliant discussion of Anglo-American, French, and Italian feminisms and feminist theories, which creates a critical frame for her readings. With enviable clarity, she explicates the various positions and strains of discourses produced by such figures as Teresa de Lauretis, Julia Kristeva, Adriana Cavarero, Rosi Braidotti, and Judith Fetterly, among many others, carefully mapping the different terrains, points of intersection and divergence, gaps, and blind spots as they engage with the complex feminist issues noted above. By so doing, Carol carved out a substantial space for Italian feminism and feminist theories in a discursive field dominated, more or less, by French and Anglo-American counterparts. Moreover, her discussion made the concerns, ideas, and distinct propositions posed in theoretical and literary works by a broad array of Italian women linguistically and intellectually accessible to non-Italian readers, opening possibilities for reflection and discussion among experts and students alike.For similar reasons, Carol's talented work in translation, a process of creative labor that was, as she told me, “like baking bread,” merits special attention. Among her translations from Italian to English are such short stories as “Northern Hills” by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, “Women at the Pool” by Sandra Petrignani, and the critically acclaimed collection of stories by Anna Banti, “The Signorina” and Other Stories (2001), which Carol cotranslated with Martha King. Part of the prestigious Modern Language Association editorial project designed to publish short fiction from non-English literatures in parallel editions, one in English translation and the other in the original language, the volume features five short stories in diverse genres, including mystery, science fiction, and historical fiction. The superbly fluid translations enable new communities of readers to appreciate Anna Banti's breadth of themes and styles, which reach well beyond those exhibited in her famed novel Artemisia. The importance of such work can not be emphasized enough, especially in a field like Italian Studies, whose texts in literature, theory, and criticism are often overshadowed by better known national literatures.In December, as 2021 was drawing to a close, Carol and I mused about our projects, past, ongoing, and future, as well as detours our work unexpectedly took of its own will. Ever modest where her own professional accomplishments were concerned, she measured the success of her life's work in research and teaching purely by what it enabled colleagues and students to achieve, in her words, “taking the field where [she] wanted it to go, in the hands of the young.” In this regard, the field of Italian studies has benefited enormously from Carol's formidable voice in a variety of roles ranging from vice president and president of the American Association of Italian Studies (2006–2009, 2009–2016) and representative for Italian on MLA committees to editorial advisor for university presses and, perhaps most important, inspiring mentor to three generations of scholars. What runs throughout the manifold ways in which Carol served and contributed to the profession is her smile, evoked in the many tributes to her memory made by friends, former students, and fellow travelers in academia and beyond.